College of Menominee Nation 2008 Campus Sustainability Leadership Award Application

Category

Community Colleges & Other Two Year Institutions

College of Menominee Nation is chartered by the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin Photographer: Dale Kakkak

Contact

William M Van Lopik
Academic Program Director for Sustainable Development
Sustainable Development Institute
College of Menominee Nation
Keshena, WI
(715) 799-5600
wvanlopik@menominee.edu

Governance & Administration

The College of Menominee Nation was founded in 1993 and chartered by the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin. At the time of its’ founding the Sustainable Development Institute was started as a research and resource support institute to the college. This helped infuse the concepts of sustainability into the fabric of the college right from its inception. This obviously occurred well before most other colleges were talking about sustainability issues.

The commitment of the college to sustainability has not only been a long-term proposition, but one that is evidenced in many declarations that it has signed on to. President Dr. Verna Fowler signed the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment in 2006. She also attended this year’s annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative in New Orleans. The college is a member of AASHE and recently hired a full-time Sustainability Coordinator to help operationalize its’ sustainability goals. For a college of only 550 students, this hire was a bold move and one that demonstrates a commitment to becoming more sustainable. This coordinator has recently assembled a Campus Sustainability Advisory Group. This group is composed of faculty, staff, students and community members. This group will serve as a support group for the coordinator to help him gain commitments from the various departments and staff with whom full participation is needed.

The Leadership Team of the college received training this past year on Triple Bottom Line accounts management from Paul Linzmeyer of Ecolution, Inc. That is, looking a full cost accounting in the way we do business at the college in regards to economic, social and environmental costs.

The Sustainable Development Institute of the college has developed a Strategic Plan that highlights measurable goals for how the office will work towards sustainability this next year. The plan includes economic, social and environmental objectives.

Operations

The College of Menominee Nation has made significant progress in the past year at becoming a more sustainable or green campus. The college has taken its commitment to sustainability seriously in addressing the design of its new Library. The “flagship” building is being built to the equivalent of a US Green Building Council’s LEED “Silver” rating, designed to be 29% more efficient than Wisconsin’s Uniform Building Code minimum standards. Earth friendly features include 36 geothermal wells that will heat and cool the main and upper floors of the building; natural day lighting throughout the building; structural insulating roof panels; heat recovery ventilation; low VOC and locally produced building materials including white pine paneling from the Menominee Indian Tribe’s sustainably managed forests; and daylight and occupancy sensors.

Landscape features will include a bios wale storm water retention area featuring native plants as well as a public plaza area and a campus green. Over 60 sizable pine trees were saved and moved from the building site to other locations on campus as part of the project, and a local “Wild Ones” chapter moved native wildflowers that would also have fallen victim to the construction. New walking trail improvements are planned for the spring with lots of potential “hands-on” opportunities for native plantings to follow.

The college maintenance department also is addressing its’ commitment to sustainability by only using biodegradable cleaning products. They also have greatly limited their use of chemicals on the lawns, bushes and trees that surround the campus. Maintenance was helpful to students with our participation in the national Recyclemania Competition during the past 2 years. Maintenance would collect all recyclable products from the campus on a daily basis and place them in a room for students to weigh. The results were tracked over a 10 week period and then entered into the competition against other schools. Both years we placed about in the middle of the 200+ schools that participated. We were thrilled to say that we beat out Ohio State University at something. Although the competition only lasts for 10 weeks, it definitely has raised the awareness of the staff and student body on the objectives and purpose for recycling.

Our Sustainability Coordinator is currently in the process of benchmarking the total energy use of the campus. This includes our electricity, natural gas, water usage, and transportation miles. He is gathering this information with the assistance of several students. With this information as a benchmark, we will then set reduction goals for the next sequence of years.

Curriculum & Research

The College of Menominee Nation is one of few, if not the only community college in the United States to have offered an Associates degree in Sustainable Development for the past 15 years. Graduates from the program have most often transferred to larger universities to pursue their bachelor’s or master’s degrees. Additionally, there are written plans to begin offering a 4 year baccalaureate degree in sustainable development within the next 2 years at our college. The Introduction to Sustainable Development course that is offered at CMN is a general education requirement; therefore all degree-seeking students are required to take it.

The college also offers a 2-year Associates degree in Sustainable Forestry. This academic program compliments the efforts of the Menominee Indian Tribe in their forest management practices. The College of Menominee Nation’s Sustainable Development Institute is currently engaged in a research project designed to better assess the relationship of American Indian communities to their forested tribal lands. The Project Research Team includes faculty and staff of College of Menominee Nation’s Sustainable Development Institute and Pennsylvania State University’s Department of Rural Sociology and College of Forestry, and the USDA Forest Service. The purpose of the research effort is to gain better insight into the breadth and multiple perspectives of native nations actively engaged in management of forest lands. This is particularly important in respect to how native owned forest lands are evaluated under the Montreal Process, an international accord to promote sustainable forests globally.

The Sustainable Development Institute is also currently involved in a Sustainability Indicators Research Project. The institute is collaborating with Iowa State University on developing a checklist of sustainability indicators that tribal colleges can use to benchmark their progress towards sustainability. We are currently in year 2 of this research project.

In 2004 and again in 2007 the college sponsored an international conference called “Sharing Indigenous Wisdom: An International Dialogue on Sustainable Development.” The premise of the conference was that indigenous peoples all over the world are steadily confronted with outside pressures of having both their land and cultures assimilated into the dominant cultural context. There is currently an acute need to explore successful models of sustainable development that allow for the preservation of indigenous lands, sovereignty and culture, while also allowing for the integration of economic development, institutional capacity-building and technological advancement.

The Menominee believe their model of sustainable development provides clues to the kind of values, economic system, and social order that might be necessary in a sustainable world. As the state of the world's environment becomes more critical, it is believed that this model as well as other principles derived from indigenous wisdom might offer clues from which the modern world can learn as it desperately seeks development alternatives.

The conference was modest in numbers, but rich in dialogue as indigenous scholars from many parts of the world came to Wisconsin to share their knowledge. Plans are to continue to hold the conference every 3 years as funding permits.

Campus Culture

Sustainability has taken root within the culture of our college in many small, but significant ways. Students pick up trash along 1 mile of a state highway during our annual Adopt A Highway program. There are also recycling bins in every office and classroom on campus. The student CMN SEEDS group has been selling coffee on campus for the past 3 years. This is a student group which stands for "Strategies in Environmental Education, Development and Sustainability." They have taken on the environmentally sustainable project of selling fair trade, organic, shade-grown, and bird friendly coffee from Chiapas, Mexico. The group has personally chosen their own blend of coffee, developed their own marketing label, and visited the coffee cooperative in Mexico that grows it. The coffee sales are used to support the farmers in Chiapas as well as the local SEEDS chapter as they undertake other environmentally based projects throughout the academic year.

The college participated in 2 national environmental events this past year. The first one was the Great Lakes Earth Day Challenge sponsored by the EPA. The college was a drop off site for e-waste and expired pharmaceuticals. The students planned the event and worked with area law enforcement and solid waste coordinators in collecting and disposing of the materials. The event received a great deal of media publicity on national environmental websites. The college also participated in the National Wildlife Federation’s Chill Out competition in the spring of 2008. Out of 70 entries in the competition we placed as a runner-up in recognition of some of our sustainability efforts.

Our college welcomes many international indigenous visitors every year. They come to visit for basically two reasons: 1) they are fascinated with our status as a tribal college and want to know more about how we infuse concepts of sustainability and culture into our curriculum: 2) they want to visit the Menominee Forest, which is internationally acclaimed as a prime example of sustain-yield forestry at its finest. The presence of these visitors is a huge affirmation to our college that we are doing something special.

Our campus Sustainability Coordinator is a participant in the American Indian and Alaska Native Climate Change Working Group. Additionally, he has been approached by a group of students from our college who want to voluntarily assist him in helping us become a green campus. This group of some 10 students all came to him individually to volunteer their time. We now call them the Sustainability Student Advisory Group which meets on a weekly basis throughout the academic year.

This next year the Sustainable Development Institute will be developing a Sustainability Pledge that we will ask all graduates to consider signing.

Community Service and Outreach

The College of Menominee Nation’s Sustainable Development Institute has sponsored and hosted a number of conferences and forums devoted to sustainability. They sponsored a Tribal Green Design Summit on March 20-21, 2007 which was co-sponsored by the U.S. EPA. They hosted a Tribal Waste Management and Federal Collaboration workshop during fall, 2007 as well as an Ecological Forestry workshop in partnership with the USDA Forestry Department. During the spring of 2008 the Sustainable Development Institute was able to give a presentation to 48 Wal-Mart store managers from the region who were meeting at the college.

We have also been involved in hosting a candidate’s forum for individuals who are running for election on the Menominee Tribal Legislature and to serve on the board of directors of the Menominee Tribal Enterprises (tribal sawmill). These forums are open to the public and web cast to interested tribal members in the Midwest. We feel sustainability requires an informed public who is able to interact with their officials.

As mentioned before, the Sustainable Development Institute regularly gives forest tours to groups who want to learn more about sustainable forestry practices. An on-campus walking trail was built through the forest in 2006 to provide students and staff to exercise and get a respite from their studies. The trail is an integral part of the entire health and wellness programs that the college is promoting. This also includes free exercise and aerobic classes and an exercise room.

For the past 3 years the college has participated in the VITA program. This is a Volunteer Income Tax Assistance Program sponsored by the Internal Revenue Service. Trained community volunteers (mostly from the college) help community members to prepare their tax returns for free. They help find special credits, such as Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), Child Tax Credit, and Credit for the Elderly for which they may qualify. In addition to free tax return preparation assistance, we offer free electronic filing (e-filing). Individuals taking advantage of the e-file program receive their refunds in half the time compared to returns filed on paper. It is calculated that this service has saved local residents thousands of dollars. This has helped keep the money in the local economy to help sustain local businesses. This is a benefit that is very important to the people of Menominee County, which happens to be the poorest in the state of Wisconsin and 38th poorest in the entire United States.