Office interns Tiffany Kingston and Colleen Sullivan have been hard at work this semester trying to integrate sustainability into the culture of the Greek Life here at CofC.  One of their initiatives includes the creation of a monthly newsletter crafted specifically for Greeks.  The news letter highlights sustainability events that are coming up, chapters that have specific achievements in sustainability, features articles about sustainability issues and much more!  We will publish the newsletter here on the blog every! Here are the October and November issues:

GreekNewsletterOct

GreekNewsletterNov

 

The newest component to the Greek Life Sustainability project is the composition of a packet with eco-friendly suggestions for the greek organizations. Each sorority and fraternity will receive a packet with solutions to make marketing, carpooling/ traveling, service ware, decorating, and food beverage more sustainable within the greek community. This packet will include a clear definition of problems with these currents practices as well as four potential solutions. In addition, we plan to contact the various RA’s of each greek house and conduct a survey of their houses. In these surveys we will note what is being done with a sustainable conscious and what practices can be improved.  As members of greek life, we are all very excited to implement change. Because each of these problems is being addressed by members within the greek community, we believe these are problems that can be fixed.

This week we’ve been working on getting in touch with presidents and house managers of various sororities and fraternities on campus.  We hope to set dates and times to go into the houses and do an initial sustainability audit.  It has been a hectic week for many sororities and fraternities, as many are voting in a new executive council.  When things settle down we will be able to get back on track with setting up audit dates.  In the mean time, we are working on putting together a comprehensive reference packet to guide Greek life in hosting sustainable events.  We will be addressing issues such as transportation, food, and decorating.  We will be outlining various current issues surrounding the topics and offer several sustainable solutions.  Hopefully this packet will encourage sustainable practices across Greek life.  We are really excited about getting this project up and running, and we hope to instill that excitement in the Greek community.

The Greek sustainability project is off to a good start! We have met with Panhellenic, Intrafraternity Council and the National Panhellinic Council in the past two weeks to introduce the project to the Greek community. We have developed a rubric to be used for the baseline audits and have assigned houses to complete solicitations and establish contacts with the presidents of the Greek houses. We are still learning how to motivate and organize a large audience and how to appeal to the Greek community for maximum involvement. Responses so far have ranged from enthusiastic to apathetic, but we hope that involvement and participation will increase once we formally begin the process of contacting the Houses and planning the audits. The Office interns are super pumped to begin implementation and get our project off the ground!! Sustainability, here we come!