By Angela Halfacre, Director of Sustainability and Associate Professor of Political Science, Furman University
(For more information about the Climate Action Plan Workshop at Furman, including the agenda, Powerpoint presentations, and impressions of participants, go to http://www.furman.edu/sustain/capworkshop.htm.)
Are you feeling overwhelmed by the challenges of creating a Climate Action Plan (CAP)? Are you frustrated by the difficulties of galvanizing a campus behind the Presidents' Climate Commitment? Are you eager to learn from the efforts of others? The need to address these and other questions prompted The James B. Duke Endowment and Furman University to co-sponsor a CAP workshop in January 2009. The primary goal was to nurture collaboration, inspire creativity, and wrestle with CAP-related questions common to all campuses, and ultimately to create a CAP template for each school. Teams from four colleges that are annual beneficiaries of The Duke Endowment—Davidson College, Duke University, Furman University, and Johnson C. Smith University—converged at Furman's campus in Greenville, South Carolina. They were joined by representatives from Cornell University, Middlebury College, Pomona College, and the University of New Hampshire (UNH), along with staff members from Clean Air-Cool Planet.
