This semester, I had to do a literature review for my Foundations of Public Policy class, so I chose a topic that I’m particularly interested in after working on Berklee’s STARS report: voluntary environmental standards. I wondered if they actually worked. My conclusion, after much research, was: kinda. Voluntary environmental programs are indeed more flexible […]

This week I was at the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education conference, presenting a session on evaluating on-campus farmers markets. It was based on a survey that I formulated during a Program Evaluation class at Tufts and conducted at Berklee. Some of the results I found from researching other markets’ evaluations […]

My last two sessions of AASHE 2011 both dealt with farmers markets, from two very different perspectives: a school in British Columbia with a resistant food services contractor and a school in Arizona with campus-wide support. A sustainability manager and a professor of forest ecology from University of Northern British Columbia talked about their experiences starting […]

More than anything at AASHE 2011, I hope that the lessons from Leith Sharp’s talk stay with me once I get back to work. The former sustainability director at Harvard, she focused on change management strategies for large organizations. My big takeaway? My role at Berklee (and the sustainability coordinator’s, if we ever get one) […]

So far AASHE 2011 has been a combination of inspiration and practical advice—a good mix, I think. It’s all a bit overwhelming, though. After spending a day and a half meeting people from colleges with lots of resources devoted to sustainability, sometimes with a couple dozen people in their AASHE delegations, I was wondering how […]