https://hope.edu/offices/sustainability/staff/green-team.html
Presenting our 2022 Hope Advoates for Sustainability (HAS) Annual Report! Check out this snapshot of some of the amazing things our students did this year. Thank you to everyone who helped or participated in one of our events/activities.
We are so excited to be on this sustainability journey with all of you!
#sustainablehope #hopesustains
Happy Earth Month from the HopeSustains group!
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In Holland, we believe that in order to become a vibrant, world-class community we must look at all aspects of our community. This includes the “Triple Bottom Line” and the economic, social, and environmental impacts we all have. Our City of Holland Sustainability Committee created a seven-pillar framework with “lenses” to help us evaluate and make more sustainable choices. We have used this framework model as a way to identify the 2023 Hope College Sustainability Research Projects.
The Sustainability Institute would like to formally recognize the following projects that presented during the 2023 Celebration of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity (CURCA) on Friday, April 14.
PDF Document: 2023 Sustainability Research Projects
Framework Categories:
SMART ENERGY
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
TRANSPORTATION
COMMUNITY & NEIGHBORHOOD
QUALITY OF LIFE
COMMUNITY KNOWLEDGE
ENVIRONMENTAL ACTION & AWARENESS
For more information about the Annual Celebration visit:
https://hope.edu/academics/celebration-undergraduate-research/
The students and their projects represented all of the college’s academic divisions — the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural and applied science.
The research and performance celebration, first presented in 2001, is designed to spotlight the quality and importance of student-faculty collaborative research at Hope. Undergraduate research is a hallmark experience for many Hope students and has been a teaching model used at the college for more than seven decades. Mentored collaborative research happens year-round, with approximately 300 students conducting faculty-supervised independent research during the academic year and 200 doing research over the summer, making Hope’s summer research program among the largest in the nation at a liberal arts college. Since faculty are active in scholarship year-round, many more students engage in research during the academic year.
Research has a long and storied history at Hope College. More than 100 years ago, biologist Dr. Samuel O. Mast designed research laboratory space for the college’s Van Raalte Hall, which opened in 1903. The late Dr. Gerrit Van Zyl, who taught chemistry at the college from 1923 to 1964, is widely recognized for developing research-based learning at Hope in its modern sense.
Hope Advocates for Sustainability and GreenHope have a FULL month of activities and events planned to help you learn more about how you can help protect and connect with nature this Earth Month (and any day after that)!
Follow this link to see details about all of the events.
Presentations will be made by the following Global Water Research Institute Faculty:
Dr. Kenneth Brown, Professor of Chemistry and Schaap Research Fellow
Dr. Virginia Parish Beard, Associate Professor of Political Science with student assistant Makayla Wilson
Dr. Brent Krueger, Professor of Chemistry and Schaap Research Fellow
This is a free event and community members are welcome to join.
We hope you enjoyed this first issue and if you’ve not already done so, please click here to subscribe to our quarterly newsletter or get involved in our group. Please share this with other Hope College alumni that you think may be interested in receiving this information.
The Hope College Alumni Sustainability Affinity Group challenges you to commit to one of our three sustainability pledges this November. This pledge challenge is open to all alumni, staff/faculty, and current students and we will announce the group with the most pledges at the end of November.
How will you go green with the orange and blue this November?
Go meatless (vegetarian) one day of the week.
Unplug vampire electronics (a device that continues to use energy and drain power, even when it is turned off).
Practice No Straw November: say “No” when offered single-use plastic straws.
Are you considering pursuing an internship addressing environmental advocacy and/or education with a non-profit organization for the 2023 summer? If so, Hope College is offering a new funding source to support your low or non-paid role: the Environmental Internship Fund. This new fund will provide up to $4,000 to support a full-time summer internship addressing a pressing climate change issue. This is not an internship, but funding to support your environmental internship. Apply through this link by Monday, November 21st.
Join Hope Advocates for Sustainability at one of our fall cleanup events as we put Creation Care into action. We will be hosting cleanups at Kollen Park and Holland State Park in October.
Additional details can be found at this link, and you must RSVP in advance. Registrations close a couple of days prior to each event.
Hope to see you there!
Natalie Hammer and Ellie Jankowski Hope Advocates for Sustainability
HOLLAND — Hope College’s commitment to sustainability is evident through the work of the Hope Advocates for Sustainability, a team of student interns who were in action before fall-semester classes even began at the end of August.
Hope Advocates for Sustainability, known to students as HAS, promotes various aspects of sustainability on campus in areas such as waste management, transportation, residential life, conservation and environmental justice.
This year’s 14 interns made an early start, implementing a freshman move-in day recycling program on Aug. 26 for the boxes and packaging that would be left over after the approximately 950 members of the new Class of 2026 had settled into their new campus home.
Interns were stationed at two locations on campus, where they were available to answer questions about recycling and worked to properly dispose of materials. In total, and in just under five hours, 90 pounds of plastic film and styrofoam were recycled and a 20-yard industrial-sized cardboard recycling container was filled.
This initiative helped to save all of those materials from going to the landfill and helped educate incoming students on campus recycling.
The success of the move-in day recycling program is propelling HAS into the semester with many other events and projects in development. Interns are looking for ways to increase student involvement in sustainable efforts through the use of social media and various on-campus events.
In past years, HAS has facilitated numerous events during Campus Sustainability Month in October. Some include Holland State Park and Kollen Park clean-ups, information tables addressing the complexities of recycling, and a reusable utensil event where over 60 sets of utensils collected from local thrift stores were given away.
This year, interns have begun to dream about additional ways Hope’s campus and student body can become more aware of their impact on the environment.
HAS plans on partnering with various on-campus organizations such as the Student Activity Committee and the Center for Diversity and Inclusion to empower as many students as possible to be activists for change. HAS plans to continue its Stormwater Stewards Program, through which on-campus cottage and apartment residents are encouraged to keep the stormwater drain in front of their building clear of litter and debris.
Hope’s campus also offers a variety of green programs through which students can recycle candy wrappers, used pens, batteries and plastic bags in various locations around campus.
Hope’s sustainable efforts are not restricted to recycling, but flow into dining and waste management services as well. Students who live in cottages and apartments are able to request compost bins to dispose of their food waste and compostable materials.
— Hope College junior Natalie Hammer, a social work and German major, and senior Ellie Jankowski, a business and communications major, are co-presidents of Hope Advocates for Sustainability.
