Smith has touched on an issue we have been discussing within AASHE.  Should we create some kind of "AASHE Student Chapters" for the students in our member institutions?  Would there be an advantage to the student chapters to create sub-networks within AASHE?  Could there be a relationship build between student chapters and the Student Summit that is held at the AASHE conference and co-sponsored by NWF?   It would be good for us to get an indication of the level of interest (how many campuses might want to have a student chapter); what the activities of student chapters might be; and how AASHE could facilitate the networking among the chapters.

I like the idea of being able to have our student groups network with other student groups at colleges and universities across the nation.  I am sure that many colleges and universities already have Student Groups or Clubs dedicated to sustainability or environmental issues, so maybe there could be a way to incorporate AASHE into this groups, instead of creating seperate AASHE Student groups.  I am the advisor for our student club on campus, and I would love to give my students the opportunity to network with other AASHE schools and to bring back ideas that can make our campus more sustainable.

I'm from Australia and not from a member institution but I think it's a great idea!

Get students together talking about sustainability, understanding how it relates to their degrees and the degrees of their peers and begin to comprehend how they can participate in making the work a more sustainable place.

I'd join.

Alex

I think it would be a real benefit for our student environmental club to affiliate with AASHE. It would really help keep student activities and administrative sustainability planning on the same page. I think it would make us both more productive. 

The American Dream Is Green,
Chris O'Brien
American University

This is an excellent idea. I was a member of The Environmental Society at UT Arlington throughout last year. I am sure that student environmentalists will greatly benefit from AASHE's resources and collaboration. Being members of AASHE student charter groups can lend credibility and enhance their assertive participation in campus sustainability. In addition, student groups can provide (and receive) support - as collaborative and competitive entities participating in a nationwide sustainability network. Some more questions for us to begin thinking about would be:

• What other processes, aside from student surveys, are available to collect input from students? If a survey needs to be taken, by whom, in what way, and when?
• How would AASHE benefit from this exercise? What are the expenses involved? (say, personnel time?)
• How would AASHE handle this program, i.e., within which existing department would this program be placed?
• What registration mechanism do we offer for the groups to turn into 'student charter groups' under AASHE? i.e., Can a student group from a non-member institution join? What are the costs involved for the student groups to register?

Thank you Chris and Vinodh for raising the issue of AASHE student chapters.  Vindodh is raising some of the questions that have come up in our internal discussions about students chapters and we continue to struggle with how to put them in place and how maximize their value-added relative to other competing efforts AASHE might engage in. 

Most important to us is the answer to the question:  What is the level of demand for AASHE Student Chapters and what financial committments could such chapters make to sustain the formation of a Student Chapter unit?  If you or your campus are interested in forming a student chapter please contact Judy Walton, AASHE Membership and Outreach Director (judy@aashe.org) and let her know.  If we have a critical mass of demand we can respond appropriately.  AASHE would like to work more and better with our campus members' students and are committed to doing so.  This may be worth some discussion at the Student Summit at the AASHE 2010 Conference on 10-10-10 in Denver.  Meanwhile please use this forum to continue the discussion - the timing is perfect since we are in the process of developing our goals for 2015!

I'm not a student, but I have been involved with campus organizing and campus sustainability efforts since 2006. I am inclined to think that student chapters of AASHE is the wrong path -- both for students and for AASHE -- especially if chapters would be expected to help offset the costs.

In my opinion, sustainability depends on bottom-up thinking and local organization.  [Remember that old saying, 'Think globally, act locally.']  I do think there are things that AASHE could do to facilitate these efforts.  One example would be to gather and publish examples of successful student-driven activism; f students want to network in a student-only forum, maybe AASHE can create a place for students to share their ideas, successes, challenges, and questions.  

In my opinion, if the students at a particular school aren't interested or engaged, I don't think someone forming an AASHE chapter will accomplish much -- and if they are already engaged, then I don't think diverting energy into forming or sustaining an AASHE chapter will add much. I have seen student chapters of national organizations work, but only when the national organizations invest in campus organizers and in tools & training to facilitate activism on campus and help students learn how to build active and successful organizations.

One of the biggest problems is that many schools discourage real student activism if it involves substantive change by the institution.  I think we will accomplish more if we can find more ways to support the visionaries and activists who are out there, not try to incorporate them into our organizations.

Peter Crownfield

Campus Sustainability Initiative
Alliance for Sustainable Communities-Lehigh Valley
 

As a recent graduate and having been heavily involved in student sustainability efforts at the University of Missouri I struggle to see the benefit AASHE student chapters would add for students. Students have thousands of things going on every day, for anything to make it worth their commitment it has to offer a lot of benefits.  

From my experience any student chapter would have to:

Be easy and straight-forward to join

Offer something along the lines of a ning site or google group with a means for emailing group members and easily sharing information

Free. It has to be free (its not like students are rolling in money) or at least paid for by the institution.

The one problem you will run into, that I personally have struggled with and that I've watched happen in countless networking efforts is that students typically don't have the time to post everything that is going on. We just don't always do a very good job of documenting. My organization preached documentation and practiced it fairly well but we still struggle with getting it all on our website. So unless AASHE is going to start finding and posting material that focuses on student efforts (more than it already does) then the amount of information is going to be low.

This also seems redundant with the Sierra Student Coalition already providing resources, discussions, trainings and in some cases physical materials. How would the AASHE student chapters distinguish themselves from those national groups who offer there resources for free?

Another big point is that students can already login to AASHE resources when their campuses sign up. There are a lot of resources already on here that students can use. Perhaps it just has to be marketed that way on the campus.

In response to the idea that these chapters could help with getting people to the student summit: yes it is possible but student summits held on a Sunday for 4-hours isn't much worth the travel time or cost it would take to get to these national conferences. Power Shift works because it's accessible by a large amount of the east coast for a relatively cheap price and it is held over a weekend. Unless students are attending the AASHE conference (which I did last year, but missing almost a whole week of school was tough and luckily I had most of the cost covered by the school) it is hard to justify the trip.

I'm not saying student chapters shouldn't happen, in fact, I think it is an idea worth pursuing.  AASHE needs more student voices in the discussion. This discussion especially, needs to happen on each campus with actual students. Perhaps coordinators can be asked to hold a forum with their student groups or some active students and ask what they would like to see from an AASHE student chapter. What if a webinar or conference call was held for students about this topic? Coordinators could pass the idea along to their students. You might also be surprised as to how many are already subscribed to the AASHE newsletter. I know I was using it to find a job...

Pat

San Diego State has a great student organization called the enviro business society or better known as e3 since they incorporate environment, economics and ethics. Check out their website www.clube3.org . They have done wonderful things on our campus.

sarah campbell

This is an important discussion and I'm glad to see it taking place here. I appreciate the opportunity to contribute.

As I see it, a program that enables stronger relationships between AASHE and student organizations has great potential and could provide net benefits for both student organizations and AASHE. At the same time, like some of the other respondents, I worry that if structured and/or implemented poorly, such a program could produce few benefits while wasting a lot of time and money and damaging relationships between AASHE and student organizations.

To maximize the chance of a successful outcome, I think we'll need to develop a model that doesn't rely on charging student organizations a fee. As others have noted, student groups typically have fairly small budgets and most aren't used to paying for this kind of thing. As a result, I'd guess only a small number of student groups would be willing to pay at all. And, since the leadership and priorities of most student groups change annually, securing renewals would likely be challenging. Even the organizations willing and able to pay something aren't likely to pay much more than $100 and they'd expect substantial benefits in return. When I consider the cost to recruiting student orgs to join, processing their fees, and providing services to them, I can't see a way to make charging student groups work financially for AASHE. I also can't see it working strategically since it would create significant potential for hurting AASHE's relationship with students who didn't feel like they got their money's worth or who felt that AASHE was only interested in them for money.

Likewise, I think attempting to get students to create new organizations to serve as "official AASHE chapters" is likely to be counterproductive. It could put AASHE in competition with allied organizations that already have chapters on many campuses (e.g. Sierra Student Coalition, Student PIRGs, Net Impact) and have strong connections with many students. Moreover, creating a formal chapter structure could be perceived as linking AASHE's reputation to the student organization. AASHE might then feel the need to exert some level of control or oversight of the organization's activities, which would likely make the organization feel constrained and could also make it less effective.

Ultimately, I believe a loose affiliation model that requires no fee for participation has the best potential to create benefits for both AASHE and student organizations. In such a model, any student organization working to advance campus sustainability (or some aspect of it) , including chapters of other organizations, could submit an online form to affiliate with AASHE. They would not become formal AASHE chapters and wouldn't have to change their name to indicate a connection with AASHE. The formal designation for these organizations could be something like an "AASHE Student Organization Affiliate" and they could be part of the "AASHE Student Organization Network".

I would make the primary requirement of participation in the network be the submission of an annual report describing the organization's activities for the year and lessons learned. The reports would be submitted online and posted publicly on AASHE's website. This requirement would add great new content to AASHE's resource center and would encourage student organizations to better document their work (as Patrick noted, lack of documentation is a major problem for many student organizations). Over time, the list of annual reports would serve as a valuable historical record that new members could use to learn their organizations previous work. Making this an annual requirement of being an AASHE Student Organization Affiliate would provide a simple but effective mechanism for removing inactive groups from the network and ensuring that AASHE has up-to-date contact information for the organizations.

Other more general expectations (but perhaps not formal requirements) of Student Organization Affiliates might include:

• Supporting their institution's membership in AASHE and participation in AASHE programs like STARS
• Contributing to AASHE's interactive online resources, including forum, blog, wikis, student research database, etc.
• Promoting AASHE conference and associated student summit to their members
• Encouraging members to sign up for AASHE Bulletin
• Informing members about opportunity to apply for AASHE student leadership and student research awards

If the requirements of participation are relatively minimal and even beneficial to the student organizations (as would be the case if the requirement was just the annual report), the benefits that AASHE provides to participating student organizations would not need to be especially costly to inspire broad participation. Beyond the potential credibility gain that organizations would achieve through association with AASHE, I think the following benefits would be a good starting point:

• Name and link included on the AASHE website
• Hosting and promotion of annual reports
• Opportunities to participate in AASHE governance, including the Board of Directors, Advisory Council, Conference Program Committee, STARS Steering Committee, STARS Technical Advisors, etc.
• Opportunity to play leadership roles in planning of annual student summit
• Opportunity to organize and participate in conference calls on issues of importance to students
• Eligibility for a new student organization award, to be judged based on the annual reports

Additionally, the existing Student Leadership Award could potentially be restructured so that only participants in affiliated organizations would be eligible (instead of any student at a member institution, as present).  Since these benefits mostly build on existing activities/services, I imagine AASHE could provide most of these benefits at very low cost and thus wouldn't need to hire new staff.  The biggest cost I can see would be creating an online form for groups to submit their annual report, but that would mostly be a one time cost that would seem to fit well into existing activities related to the Resource Center. Beyond that, the main task would be preparing occasional emails to send to student organization contacts reminding them to submit annual reports or asking for help in promoting an AASHE activity.

I understand the tendency to want to strictly limit participation in the program to student organizations at AASHE member institutions, but I think this would be mistake. Connection with a student organization at a non-member institution would give AASHE a friendly contact at the institution and could be a helpful towards getting them to become a member. A better approach in my view would be allow a participation of student organization at non-member institutions with the understanding that if their institution doesn't join AASHE within some time period (maybe two years) that they would no longer be able to participate. Likewise, if a current member stopped paying dues, any student organization affiliates would have a grace period during which they could still participate in the network. This approach would allow participation in the student network to serve as a membership benefit without completely closing off relationships with friendly student organizations at non-member institutions.

Overall, I think the approach outlined here could go a long way towards addressing the unfortunate fact that, although students are key drivers of sustainability on campuses, many student sustainability advocates are currently unaware of the resources that AASHE provides and are not engaged with the organization.  I'm very curious how others reading this discussion feel- do you think the approach outlined above is workable and would be attractive to student organizations?

I hope AASHE will continue to move forward on this important issue and I look forward to any responses.

Best,

Julian

--
Julian Dautremont-Smith
MBA/MS Candidate, Class of 2012
Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise
Stephen M. Ross School of Business | School of Natural Resources & Environment
University of Michigan
http://www.linkedin.com/in/juliandautremontsmith

 I think an AASHE Student chapter system could be a great idea with lots of potential.  That is, if it is developed the right way.

I agree with others who pointed out that it would be very difficult to get student organizations to be a part of this program unless it was free.   Quite simply, students don't have the money even collectively (though they may be able to acquire the money from on-campus sources in some cases).   This is why Green Tower Sustainability (which provides free consulting services for environmentally and socially progressive student organizations) seeks out grant money to conduct its operations.   Given the reputation of AASHE and the fact that it has successfully established many other programs, i'd say acquiring grant money for such an endeavor would be relatively easy (given grants are never "easy").   

I think this would be a great way to expand the number of schools participating in the AASHE STARS program and also a great way to get staffing for the AASHE Summit, to get more robust student presentations / marketing for the summit, get more student resources on the web site, etc.   There are probably many other ways students could help AASHE and it's operations. 

For students, this could be a great opportunity to get AASHE member status (hopefully for free for student groups) and to be a part of a national network of students, staff, faculty and administrators.   There could be many other benefits as well.   I think this would differentiate AASHE Student chapters from others such as Net Impact.  

I think a lot of thought should go into how AASHE could learn from existing models of national sustainability groups in higher education, what they offer, and what they don't. Perhaps some market research would be a good idea here. Maybe a survey could be administered at the AASHE summit to see what students would be looking for in such a program or if they would be willing to pay a small membership fee. You could offer a prize for students who take part in an online survey.

Virtual Help Sessions: Possibly one way to differentiate AASHE from other groups.  AASHE could offer student groups virtual help sessions with students, faculty, staff, administration and organizations that assist student groups.  A student group trying to solve a problem could invite people from this network of students, staff, faculty and administrators to help them come up with resources and solutions.   This could be one way that AASHE could leverage its diversity of membership and technology to create unique ways to help students make a meaningful change on their campus.  

Local Autonomy: I do think student organizations part of this AASHE Student Chapter system should be locally focused and not just be involved in national level projects.   We don't want a situation where local groups are only pushing a national agenda i.e. lobbying for an national issue.   While AASHE can enable students to play a bigger role on the national level, I truly believe that the power of student organizations is really on the local level.  Sometimes the central administration of a national organization can prevent groups from autonomously taking action on the local level.  Moreover, it is often the case that groups that focus specifically on the local level are better at addressing local issues than a national organization.  (Read Andre Edwards "Sustainability Revolution".)  This makes sense as centrally run organizations have only so many resources to oversee the actions of individual chapters.   Whatever model AASHE chooses, I hope that they enable student groups to have their own local agenda and at the same time involve students in national efforts or events going on at the state and national level.  

Business Argument for Sustainability:  I think AASHE should encourage students to first and foremost use the business arguments for sustainability when trying tackle campus environmental problems.   Today, this is the way students are gaining traction on campus.   Protest, bad press, and other tactics often create rifts between student groups and campus representatives.  I think AASHE could play a vital role in educating students how to present the business argument for sustainability.  This is natural for business organizations to use business plans to prove feasibility of sustainable projects on campuses but often groups of other disciplines are not equipped to properly make a proposal to decision makers.   

Campus Networking:  AASHE could encourage student groups to seek out their allies on campus by creating networking groups.   As I continue to work with student organizations from around the country, I find that many colleges and universities have no green movement.   This does not mean that there aren't allies around them, it often means they have yet to seek them out.   The quickest way to create a green movement on a campus without one is to invite everyone together informally (perhaps in a lunch setting).   There groups and individuals can get to know various proponents of sustainability on campus, identify areas where efforts cross over and partner to maximize success.  Such groups have led to all types of action on campus from event collaborations to creation of new senate committees for sustainability.   But it all starts by creating the physical forum to collaborate.  

____________________________________________________________________________