In an effort to engage the campus community in these conversations, the ESSC is hosting a weekly column in the Collegian. What’s the ESSC you ask? The Environmental Stewardship & Sustainability Committee (ESSC for short) is a committee of the Faculty Senate and has representation from across campus, including representatives from Student Senate, Professional Staff/NFE, Civil Service employees and Aramark. We meet monthly and work with both the Senate and the Administration through our relationship with Facilities & Services, including partnering with the SDSU Sustainability Intern, Jennifer McLaughlin.

The ESSC works on various projects related to all three aspects of sustainability (equity, environment and economy) and is willing to partner with the campus community in any way we can to improve sustainability at SDSU. We’ll talk more about sustainability and our initiatives in future columns and welcome questions from the readership. Our biggest initiative for the 2015/16 year is conducting a “Sustainability Report” to gauge the campus efforts and status in this work. We are using the AASHE (Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education) rating system called STARS (Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System). Conducting a STARS report is time consuming and involves looking at many different aspects of our campus, but will allow us to compare ourselves to our peer institutions as well as track our own progress in building a sustainable campus community. We also partner with the Brookings Sustainability Committee (BSC) on initiatives such as the new Bicycle Friendly City/Campus initiative and partner with the newly forming Student Sustainability Committee (SSC) as well.  

Questions? Reach out to us! You can find out more about the ESSC and who is serving on the committee anytime by looking us up on InsideState (under Governance). Watch for future columns, follow our work and get involved – together we can build a Sustainable State.