Social Sustainability Month: Creating Cross-Campus Partnerships for Holistic Sustainability

Heather Spalding, Sustainability Leadership and Outreach CoordinatorMasters Candidate, Leadership for Sustainability Education

Agenda• At a glance: PSU• Sustainability Leadership Center• Holistic sustainability• Social Sustainability Month (SSM) over time• Partnerships and planning structure• Outreach• Evaluation process• Framing exercise • Time for questions

At a Glance: Portland State

• Founded in 1946 • 23,000 undergraduate students (30k total)• More than ½ of students from Portland

metro• Average age: 27• “Let Knowledge Serve the City“

Sustainability Leadership Center (SLC)

• Proposed by students in 2009 • A partnership between the Enrollment

Management & Student Affairs (EMSA) Division and the Institute for Sustainable Solutions

Positions include: • 1 full time Coordinator• 1 half-time graduate assistant • 6 part-time student staff positions• A variety of internship positions

Initiatives:• Sustainability in student life• EMSA goals and assessment• Annual events• Visioning• Field trips in the Portland community

SLC’s Core Programs:

Student Sustainability Leadership Council

EcoReps

Sustainability Volunteer Program

Holistic Sustainability

“A lens with which we seek to recognize and understand our interdependence with all living systems in order to strive toward environmental health, economic balance and social equity. It encompasses a worldview and actions that respect and honor our home, Earth.”

Some things “we” sometimes forget…

• Role of power and privilege• Traditional ecological knowledge• Value of multiple perspectives• History of displacement

SSM Over Time: 2010• ~18 events, ~300 individual participants• Selected events:

– Democratic Yoga– Blue Gold – The Future of Food and Seed– From Colonialism to the Globalization of Western

Patriarchal Gender Constructions– Collaborative Research as Healing: Integrating

Ethnoecology and Spirituality to Revitalize Native America– Indigenous Peoples and Sustainability in the Himalayas

and the Great Basin

SSM Over Time: 2011• 27 Events, 600+ individual participants• Created program evaluations• Integration with SLC task forces

– Social Costs: Who Pays for the Stuff You Just Bought?– Healing Our Lands, Healing Ourselves– Race and Sustainability– Interpersonal Neurobiology of Social Sustainability and Change– Cider pressing at PSU community orchard– 100 mile luncheon

2012: “Toward Community Wellness”

• 12 events• Creation of event templates• Tied to learning outcomes and values• Creation of weekly and annual themes

• Cultural• Personal and Interpersonal• Environmental • Socioeconomic and Political

• One event proposed by each SLC volunteer task force– Restoring the PSU Oak Savanna (Garden)– Thanks Giving (Food Systems)– Communicating Sustainability in a Post-Greenwashing

World (Communications)– Theater of the Oppressed (Cultural)

Partnerships and Planning Structure• Women’s Resource Center

– EcoFemme Task Force

• Sustainability Leadership Center– Task forces– Student staff

• Student groups• Faculty partners

– Sociology– Anthropology– Ecological Economics

Evaluation process• Evaluation forms at each event• Measure learning outcomes of SLC and WRC• Debrief after month ends to plan for next year

Examples:

Did the event consider the intersections between social, environmental and economic issues? (Circle one: Yes / No)

Did it address or consider multiple perspectives or solutions to a current problem or topic? (Circle one: Yes / No / Not sure)

Outreach Methods

Exercise: Framing Campus Events

Resources:

• Awakening the Dreamer Symposium (Pachamama Alliance)

• Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future (Nelson 2008)

• Understanding the Social Dimension of Sustainability (Dillard, Dujon, King 2008)

• Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh (Norberg-Hodge, 1993)

Questions?

Contact: Heather Spalding hspaldin@pdx.edu 503-725-5598

ecowiki.pdx.edu