By: Roya Ojarood
When I spoke with Morgan Hartman, Sustainability Manager at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), I expected our conversation to largely center on communications, such as what language works, what does not, and how a sustainability office communicates its work in a place and time where the word itself may not always be enough to encourage people to participate in the conversation. Instead, we kept returning to something simpler: listening. In UNL’s case, before deciding how to communicate sustainability, its Office of Sustainability first seeks to understand what its campus community cares about and how sustainability measures already align with the institution’s values. For Morgan, that has meant framing sustainability work as an extension of a responsibility–not as something separate–that is already present within the university’s identity.
Morgan led with what she described as Nebraska’s “small but mighty” sustainability team. She first joined the university about six and a half years ago as its recycling coordinator. One of her first major responsibilities was to address a recycling system that looked and functioned differently across UNL’s buildings. What initially began as a pilot program eventually became All in the Hall, the university’s standardized recycling program, which now operates in more than 100 campus buildings. For Morgan, the accomplishment is meaningful not only because of its sheer scale, but because waste provides an unusually tangible entry point into sustainability. “Especially being in the Midwest, recycling really is one of the easiest ways for us to connect with people,” she told me.
The program did not begin with the Office of Sustainability deciding what their campus needed: The university regularly conducts a sustainability culture, literacy, and transportation survey as part of its STARS reporting, and in 2019, 93 percent of respondents identified better recycling education–and opportunities–as a top sustainability priority. That feedback was the catalyst for the project and helped Morgan’s team build institutional support and secure the funding needed for new, customized containers.
There is something key in that order of events, most notably in the act of listening. The university first listened, and then acted. The result was not as simple as pitching new recycling bins, but instead became a system built around what the campus community had already identified as important.
All in the Hall also asks something of the people who use it. Standardized waste stations were placed in high-traffic hallways while containers were removed from classrooms, conference rooms, and other shared spaces. Weekly landfill waste collection from private offices also ended, meaning that individuals became responsible for bringing their waste to the centralized stations. Disposing of waste suddenly became a little less invisible and subsequently more intentional. When people hesitated and questioned the change, Morgan’s team was able to point back to the campus feedback that helped to create the program in the first place.
This relationship between listening, action, and communication extends far beyond recycling. In Nebraska, Morgan explained, the language surrounding sustainability has to make sense within the place itself. “We have a lot of land and a lot of natural resources that we have responsibility for,” she said. Because Nebraska is a public land-grant institution, the team talks about sustainability through stewardship: being responsible for the natural resources surrounding them, but also with the financial resources entrusted to the university. Additionally, rather than assuming that everyone would connect with complex, sustainability-specific terms and topics, Morgan’s team continues to connect the conversation of sustainability back to the institution’s responsibility: “We’re talking about the resources that are entrusted to us, and how are we being as responsible as we can with those?” For Morgan, responsible stewardship has become a consistent thread throughout the way the university communicates sustainability, and is one that indubitably connects the work to Nebraska’s landscape and to the natural world that is important to the people who live there.
When Morgan took over the sustainability team in 2022, she set out to make that communication more intentional. Working with the university’s communications team, the office surveyed stakeholders and developed four key messages that could guide its outreach: sustainability is the smart choice for UNL; UNL is committed to sustainability; you can make a difference; and the Office of Sustainability is a hub that can connect people with sustainability opportunities across campus.
Of those messages, the idea of the “smart choice” stood out to me. It is straightforward, which is precisely why it seems to work, but it is a broad enough message that leads to stewardship that feels good. On recycling containers, the message “recycling right” is posed as the smart choice. Similarly, in older campus buildings, light-switch stickers remind people that turning off the lights is the smart choice. The phrase ties sustainability to efficiency and resource savings, making it less of an abstract ideal and more of a practical, able-to-do decision. Morgan called it “the constant thread” running through their larger campaigns.
There is also an acknowledgement within Nebraska’s strategy that institutional systems alone cannot accomplish everything. A university can install the containers, create programs, set goals, and provide infrastructure, but community participation is also critical to success. “It takes all of us to be able to accomplish our goals,” Morgan said. The university’s broader institutional motto– ”Every person and every interaction matters”–has consequently found a natural place within its sustainability work. For example, even bringing a reusable mug to get coffee becomes part of that larger picture.
AASHE’s Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS) has provided another constant throughout Nebraska’s sustainability journey. The university began reporting to STARS in 2014, before it had adopted institutional sustainability goals, and Morgan described the framework as an important baseline for better understanding the university’s performance and comparing its progress with peer institutions. Since then, Nebraska has increased its score with every submission, moving from Bronze to Gold. More than the rating itself, though, Morgan sees STARS as something that has helped bring broader credibility to sustainability work already valued by the university’s students, faculty, and staff. That momentum has been strengthened by support from university leadership, which has helped elevate sustainability and its role within the broader university.
Ultimately, what stayed with me after our conversation was that Nebraska’s approach is not really about finding a better synonym for sustainability, as many are doing now. Instead, it is about recognizing where people are at and helping people in a specific place to understand sustainability well enough to communicate why it matters to them in a personable way. Stewardship works because responsibility for resources is already meaningful in Nebraska. Recycling works because the university listened when its community said it mattered. The “smart choice” works because it directly connects sustainability to decisions people make every single day, and to the practical realities of running an institution.
For other campuses navigating their own complicated circumstances, perhaps that is the larger lesson within Nebraska’s story. Progress does not always begin–or continue–with convincing people to adopt a new way of thinking. Sometimes, it begins by listening closely enough to recognize the values that are already there, and showing people where sustainability has been part of the conversation all along.