Related Blog Posts - Co-Curricular Education

Since the Higher Education Associations Sustainability Consortium (HEASC) first called for a campus sustainability rating system in 2006, AASHE has been creating STARS, the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment, & Rating System, for colleges and universities. After three years of collaboration with numerous higher education professionals, sustainability experts, and professional organizations, AASHE has launched the STARS 1.0 Early Release at the Greening of the Campus VIII: Embracing Change.

This post was written by Addie Davis, an intern for AASHE's STARS Program

Tree Campus USA, the Arbor Day Foundation's latest addition to a lineup of tree management certification programs including Tree City USA and Tree Line USA, is a great resource for colleges and universities interested in creating a healthy campus tree culture.

Institutions that apply for the certification are expected to exhibit superior campus tree management practices, have a strong commitment to helping local communities foster healthy urban forests, and have an exemplary commitment to and record of engaging their student populations in service learning projects focused on campus, community and forestry efforts.

Bonny Bentzin and Arianne Peterson, Manager and Project Coordinator respectively of University Sustainable Business Projects at Arizona State University, presented on their Campus Living Laboratory Network (CLLN, pronounced "clean") model - which is a way to break down on-campus barriers and allow students, faculty, and staff to implement their sustainability ideas. It allows students, faculty, and staff to come together to solve problems. CLLN is run through the ASU Global Sustainability Initiative within University Sustainable Business Projects. Here are a lot of the ideas presented during the session, with a few of my comments mixed in: Challenges of Implementing Sustainability Initiatives on campus: Students are members of the university for approximately 2 - 6 years, are physically on campus only nine months out of the year, and think in semesters. Faculty tend to think in the long term, and administrators think in the long and short term mixture.

The folks over at PaperClip Communications, an AASHE member business, are kindly offering a 10 percent discount to AASHE members on their recently released Campus Sustainability Whitepaper Series. The series is comprised of 6 whitepapers: