Synergy and Outreach

Educating Today’s Leaders

In addition to significantly enhancing Ithaca College’s ability to produce tomorrow’s leaders working for environmental change, we seek to greatly expand our outreach to both the community and other colleges and universities in order to widely disseminate our model and to create the greatest possible impact from our work and these funds. To date, we have developed an annual one-day pilot workshop on sustainability curriculum development that serves between 20 and 40 faculty participants each year. This specialized training workshop is inspired by the Ponderosa Project at Northern Arizona University and the Piedmont Project at Emory University whose developers lead AASHE’s “Train the Trainer” Program, which our two faculty workshop coordinators attended. We have also developed a strong track record in sustainable and environmentally sound campus operations.

We intend to expand these activities to better serve the larger community by launching the following:

Finger Lakes Project
To increase the capacity of Ithaca College faculty and those from other colleges as well as K-12 educational programs in the eastern United States, we propose to institutionalize the pilot faculty development workshop by increasing the length of the workshop to two days, offering stipends for participants and faculty directors, inviting keynote speakers, adding more hands-on activities and field trips, and developing an online resource with case studies describing sustainability connections across diverse curricular areas. ($65,000)

Commit-to-Change Sustainability Certification Program
To meet the requests of many colleges and universities that aspire to our level of commitment to change in operations, we intend to develop a new on-line certification program for sustainability coordinators for not only higher education institutions, but also other sectors: government, non-profit organizations, and private industry. Capitalizing on our in-house expertise in sustainability education, operations, and on-line course development, this program will give mid-career professionals project-based training in sustainability that will allow them to guide and change the practices of the organizations for which they work. We plan to award continuing education credit for the series of two-week modules we will develop. Within two years of launching the program, we anticipate that tuition will cover the operational costs. ($30,000)