Green Team & Sustainability Studies Roaring Fork Campus Accomplishments 2015

Sustainable Food Systems: Two sustainability students did internships during summer 2015 with community organizations devoted to providing access to healthy food for vulnerable populations. One student worked for Growing Food Forward (GFF) to create and deliver garden education programs to primary-school students who are on free and reduced lunch programs in Garfield County. GFF grows food in community gardens from El Jebel to Rifle, specifically for elderly and homeless populations with low food security and low access to health care. Another student interned at Glenwood Community Garden, one of the gardens that host GFF gardens, to survey community gardens around the region about their gleaning and food recovery practices and their partnerships with other organizations like GFF. Our student club, Roaring Fork Students for Sustainability, succeeded in gathering all the necessary approvals for a beehive on campus and spent its budget on a top-bar hive that is now located in the midst of our perennial garden at the Lappala Center. On May 2, a “nuc” (a queen bee with about 1,000 worker bees) was gifted to us by Jolene Singer, a local bee wizard who now consults for the club. The student leader who championed the project also took a beekeeping course from Corwin Bell at Sustainable Settings and now coordinates student participation with the hive. Six months into their life with us, the bees are apparently thriving, having filled their hive with brood and honey. In fact, their population expanded so quickly that about 20,000 of them swarmed at the end of July to a neighbors’ house, and the remaining hive (of about 20,000 bees) is constantly active and productive. Our hope is to cultivate bee habitat at the Spring Valley campus and to work with campus groundskeepers to ensure an environment free of poisons harmful to bees, with the hopes of establishing a hive near the residential hall.

To begin building bee habitat at Spring Valley campus, the student club is sponsoring a Service Learning project on Spirit Day (Oct 16): at the Spirit Day Buffalo Dance, students, staff and faculty are invited to wear “hooves” (cleats or sharp-heeled shoes) so that we can do what buffaloes do for prairie ecology: make divots in the ground for water and seeds to collect. Using seeds collected from our Lappala Center perennial garden, we will also plant beautiful bee-friendly flowers. Waste Management:

1. In a unique collaboration among the City of Aspen’s Department of Environmental Health and Sustainability, Pitkin County Landfill and EverGreen Events (a composting company located in the RF Valley), CMC students and faculty have helped create “SCRAPS,” a food-waste-diversion program that was covered in the Feb 2015 issue of the national magazine BioCycle: The Organics Recycling Authority: http://www.biocycle.net/2015/02/13/mountain-town-zeros-in-on-food-scraps-diversion/. Three sustainability students interned in formal positions with all three

of these partner organizations, and in documenting the effort, they even produced content that was used by BioCycle in this article.

2. The student who interned with EverGreen Events also organized two Waste Diversion events in the Town of Carbondale and did outreach to our town’s Latino community about the benefits of composting, including a Spanish-language presentation at local area restaurants where EverGreen will now be collecting food waste for composting. See below for coverage of her efforts in Carbondale’s weekly newspaper, The Sopris Sun.

3. Teamed up with CORE (Community Office for Resource Efficiency) to create Waste Free Roaring Fork, the Roaring Fork Valley’s first-ever comprehensive guide for where and how to responsibly divert almost any kind of material, from hazardous waste to food scraps. [pdf of waste guide enclosed with this report]

4. As of fall 2015, several CMC faculty and students have joined Carbondale’s Environmental Board in order to further galvanize such efforts, including the Town of Carbondale’s Hazardous Waste Diversion & Eco-Learning Day, where several CMC students provided information about sustainable waste management practices (such as the Waste Free Roaring Fork guide) and CMC’s sustainability programs.

Green Team representing at the Town of Carbondale’s Hazardous Waste Diversion Day (10/3/15)

From the Sopris Sun (Oct 1-7, 2015 issue):

5. Every year since 2014, we have team up with Quigley Library staff to facilitate the reuse or recycling of several hundred pounds’ worth of old VHS cassettes and decommissioned books, first with the Colorado Library Consortium (fall 2014) and then with the CD Recycling Center of America (fall 2015).

Community Leadership & Advocacy:

During the 2014-15 academic year, Roaring Fork Campus organized 13 Service Learning opportunities (via field trips and course assignments within the BASS program and via participation by the student club Roaring Fork Students for Sustainability) at the following organizations, representing 76 days’ worth of volunteer labor on a wide variety of work, from grant-writing and organizational consulting to home-building, gardening and installing solar energy systems for low-income families in our area:

o Habitat for Humanity (5 days’ combined volunteer labor) o Grid Alternatives (2 days) o Youth Recovery Center at Valley View Hospital (15 days) o NextGen Climate (1 days) o Sustainable Settings (5 days) o Dynamic Roots (15 days) o Growing Food Forward (1 days) o Grace Healthcare of Glenwood Springs (1 days) o Colorado Mountain College - Spring Valley campus (10 days) o Raising a Reader (8 days) o Energetics Education (4 days) o Aspen T.R.E.E. (4 days) o Carbondale Council for the Arts & Humanities (5 days)

During the 2014-15 academic year, Roaring Fork Campus coordinated and supervised 12 formal internships for sustainability students at the following organizations:

o Sierra Club – Rocky Mountain Chaptero City of Aspen – Canary Initiative o City of Aspen – Department of Environmental Health & Sustainability o United States Forest Service – White River National Forest o The Manaus Fund o EverGreen Events o Aspen T.R.E.E. o Glenwood Community Garden o IslandWood (Bainbridge Island, WA) o JVA Consulting o Middle Colorado Watershed Council o Growing Food Forward o Colorado Mountain College - Gateway Program

Sustainability Education: 1. Our Lappala Center in Carbondale hosted the Colorado Alliance of Environmental Education’s Western Slope

summit on Oct 6, 2015, attended by 45 people, including presentations by two CMC faculty members and a CMC graduate.

At the CAEE Summit hosted by our Carbondale campus in fall 2015,

Susy Ellison of Energetics Education demonstrates a Solar Roller, a remote-controlled, solar-powered vehicle assembled by students who receive a kit from Energetics Education.

2. Every year since 2012, we have teamed up with Quigley Library staff to compile a categorized list of new

sustainability-related titles in the library collection. Energy Efficiency:

1. On 1/19/15, we installed an astronomical clock (Astronomic 7-Day Time Switch by Intermatic model ET8000 series) in Carbondale to monitor when the parking lot lights go on and off.

2. LED lights in campus parking lots. After a first round of LED installations at our Spring Valley parking lots in August 2014, we finally got the last bulbs installed at Spring Valley in December 2014. The parking lots at our two sites in Glenwood Springs and Carbondale will be completely upgraded to LED this fall 2015.

3. We have now installed motion sensors in Sopris Residential Hall (at Spring Valley), so that the lights now dim in the halls at night.

4. We installed in our Carbondale building a “ven-mizer,” which is a device that minimizes the amount of electricity that can be used by our vending machine – e.g. turning off the electricity during off hours and turning it back on only when people approach the machines or when the internal temperature climbs above a certain limit.

5. We are applying for a grant to replace our boiler in Carbondale with a new, high-efficiency boiler (so that the pump is not on all the time, e.g. heating water when there is no demand). Should we install that boiler, we will make sure that students, faculty and staff follow up on the Energy Navigator to track the savings.

Water Efficiency:

1. Our sustainability student club at Spring Valley has initiated a large-scale xeriscaping project at Spring Valley, which will commence with Spirit Day on Oct 16, 2015, and will work to re-wild large swathes of our grounds (which are currently watered so as to maintain golf-course-like fescue landscaping) with native plants that do not need irrigation.

2. In spring 2015, we installed low-flow shower heads in Sopris Residential Hall. 3. With baseline water-audit data collected by Natural Capitalism Solutions this fall 2015, we hope to measure our

reductions for years to come.

Green Team & Sustainability Studies Roaring Fork Campus Accomplishments 2014

Sustainable Food Systems: After multiple attempts in the past to divert our Spring Valley cafeteria’s food waste away from the landfill and back into the soil, we have finally succeeded! Thanks to the leadership of Mary McPhee, our Sodexo director of food management on campus, we are now composting 2,200-2,500lbs of food waste every month by giving it to a neighboring ranch that feeds it to their pigs. Students are excited to sort their compostable waste at the end of their meal, and kitchen staff are assiduously doing so as they prepare meals, with the knowledge that at the end of the school year we will all have a big feast with the animals raised on the scraps. Read about the program in the Fall 2014 issue of Sodexo’s national publication Marketbeat (pp. 12-13): http://viewer.zmags.com/publication/e881b6ea# One of our senior BASS students was featured in a front page article of the Aspen Daily News (Sept 17, 2014) thanks to the success she is having as a sustainable agriculture entrepreneur. In her Social Entrepreneurship class in 2012, she became so startled by the amount of food waste in the US food system that she began collecting unsold food not fit for human consumption from her local Whole Foods Market and area restaurants, in order to feed it to her pigs and to create compost. Not only does she sell the compost to local gardeners, she raises beautiful and tasty pigs on the scraps. Read the story at: http://www.aspendailynews.com/section/home/163488 Our Lappala Center in Carbondale installed a forest garden on its grounds in summer 2014, with the help of students, faculty, staff and community partners. Over two dozen heritage fruit and nut trees and bushes (obtained from Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute) were planted along with dozens of strawberry plants and seeds of native Rocky Mountain wildflowers. To prepare the garden, a few dying Chinese elms were felled and chipped into pieces, in order to be sheet-mulched on top of a layer of cardboard and a layer of oak leaves obtained from neighbors, and then topped with a layer of 10-year-old manure from our Veterinary Technology program’s farm at Spring Valley. What was once a dead zone consisting of nothing but gravel and weeds has become a thriving wildlife habitat complete with forage for pollinators, birds and small mammals.

Students, faculty & community volunteers join Force

to plant trees at our Lappala Center in Carbondale (June 2014) Student Engagement & Service Learning: A group of committed students from a variety of programs have banded together to create the Roaring Fork Students for Sustainability Club, which is driven by a mission to engage in community service projects around the RF Valley. Some

projects engaged so far by club members include: installation of two PV systems on the homes of low-income families (with Grid Alternatives); build days with Habitat for Humanity (which is building two LEED-plantinum homes in Carbondale); and a road clean-up for the entire three-mile stretch between Spring Valley campus and the “bottom of the hill” at Hwy 82, when we collected over 1,000 lbs of trash and recyclable material, which was sorted while collecting so that we could take the recyclable material to the proper place.

Community Leadership & Advocacy: One of our May 2014 BASS graduates was elected to the Town of Carbondale Board of Trustees, where she is adamantly pursuing an agenda of environmental and social justice. She ran on an explicit sustainability platform and won the most votes of all candidates. One of her projects involves reforming the justice system of Garfield County to include restorative justice programs for youth (rather than traditional detention) in order to avoid or reduce incarceration time for at-risk youth. Thanks to having focused on this ambitious agenda for her capstone project with us, she is organizing such programs in cooperation with current BASS students and graduates who are doing eco-restoration work (see below), with the goal of helping juveniles heal both themselves and the planet at the same time. She continues to work closely with CMC administration in partnering on sustainability-oriented community projects. Another senior BASS student is doing a paid internship with the City of Aspen’s Department of Environmental Health and Sustainability (EHS). His work includes: ensuring compliance, among businesses and users of public space, with City of Aspen ordinances that relate to environmental health, such as those regulating Particulate Matter; coordinating waste reduction through the City’s ZGreen initiative; and spearheading the expansion of the City’s Aspen Tap program that promotes the consumption of tap water instead of bottled water at a number of water fountains around town. The same student won a Great Lakes National Scholarship, in the amount of $2,500, for the 2014-15 school year, in recognition of his successes, including his internship with the City of Aspen and his participation in the annual “Sustaining Colorado Watersheds” conference held in Avon Oct 8-10, 2013, a trip that was awarded to him as a scholarship by the Colorado Water Conservation Board. Two BASS students, including a 2013 graduate and a current student, are working for NextGen Climate doing climate advocacy work in Eagle and Pitkin Counties. In order to publicize and celebrate our investment in a regional charging infrastructure for electric vehicles (EVs), our campus greenies partnered with CLEER and Rocky Mountain Institute to host the first-ever Electric Vehicle Rally of the Rockies. On October 3, EV drivers converged on our parking lot in Carbondale from multiple directions: from Grand Junction, Vail and Snowmass, with charging stops in Parachute, Glenwood Springs, Aspen and Basalt. Press events at each location along the way drew crowds and enthusiastic buy-in from Chambers of Commerce and Boards of Tourism, and the whole thing was filmed by students from our Isaacson School of New Media, for compilation into a documentary film. The

event was a lot of fun, especially for the costumed drivers, and garnered us a lot of positive press coverage, including The Vail Daily, The Post Independent, The Aspen Times, GreenBiz, CBS Denver, The Grand Junction Sentinel and The Sopris Sun. Conservation: Another of our 2014 BASS graduates, who spent his 3 years in the program studying the potential application of biochar in ecological restoration, found that his dedication earned him a paid Park Ranger Internship with the Bureau of Land Management’s Silt Field Office, where he did ecological monitoring and GIS work during summer 2014. Another 2014 BASS graduate lined up a full-time job with the Colorado Parks and Wildlife (formerly known as the Division of Wildlife) and began that job on May 5, two days after graduating! He is doing wildlife management of fish in Moffat County. One of our senior BASS students is working with the US Forest Service to measure the effects of a bioremediation project in Coal Basin (Crystal River Valley, just west of Redstone), where a large pile of coal mine tailings (left over from John Osgood’s operations at the turn of the 20th century) have been leeching heavy metals into our water for over one hundred years. This project involves the application of biochar (pyrolized wood) and compost tea (liquid infused with trillions of beneficial microbes) to help replenish the tailings with soil and native grasses. A unique spin being added by our student is to test the microbial health of the soil, instead of just the chemical profile (as is generally the extent of such monitoring). Since soil health depends so much on microbial ecosystems, adding this layer to the study can demonstrate the effectiveness of permaculture interventions in doing large-scale ecological restoration. Another senior BASS student is doing a wildlife monitoring project (specifically, small mammal trapping) to measure the effects of the White River National Forest effort to rehabilitate winter habitat for elk and bighorn sheep in Avalanche Creek. Here is a nice video that our marketing department made about his work: http://vimeo.com/105686391 Another senior BASS student landed a full-time seasonal position (funded by the Yosemite Conservancy and the American Alpine Club) with the National Park Service at Yosemite National Park, where she gets to combine her passion for rock climbing with her BASS training in sustainability education. Her position is called a “Climbing Stewart,” which entails leading training sessions for the many rock-climbing locals and tourists who frequent the parks, educating them on waste management and best practices in rock conservation. Sustainability Education: Another senior BASS student spent his summer 2014 working at IslandWood, an outdoor environmental learning center located on Bainbridge Island, Washington. He was responsible for planning and implementing an entire unit of environmental education for 1st-graders. Since IslandWood provides accredited instruction in environmental education that counts toward the University of Washington’s Masters of Education degree, our BASS student got to work with mentors from the M.Ed. students from UW. Another of our 2013 graduates received a fellowship from the Buell Foundation (in collaboration with the Clayton Early Learning Foundation) to attend the Buell Early Childhood Leadership Program at UC Denver – a highly selective cohort of only 20 students from around the state. Through that program she plans to obtain her Masters, and possibly her Ph.D., in Early Childhood Leadership, in order to integrate sustainability into early childhood education. Her Masters’ thesis focuses on how to create accessible outdoor play spaces for handicapped children. On November 14, our Lappala Center in Carbondale will be a distance hub for the U.S. Green Building Council’s Colorado chapter’s annual conference called the Green Schools Summit. This year the theme is “21st Century Design,” emphasizing green school design. This event is free to CMC students, faculty and staff, as well as community members. Other Student Success Highlights from 2014 Another senior BASS student was recently hired by Environmental Resource Management, an international sustainability consulting firm, for a full-time position starting immediately after the Fall 2014 semester. He has one course left in the program, his capstone research project, which he will apply directly to his new position, called Junior Consultant. Of

particular value to the employer was the student’s hands-on experience in the program, including his paid internship (during the summer of 2014) with JVA Consulting, LLC, a nonprofit that provides full organizational consulting services to green businesses and sustainability-oriented nonprofits.

One of our junior students writes a monthly column on sustainability in the Carbondale newspaper The Sopris Sun. Another senior BASS student was recently published in The Place Where You Live, a section of the nationally-renowned Orion Magazine. Read his elegy to Glenwood Springs here. The same poem won a 1st-place award and publication in CMC’s literary/art journal Rocky Mountain Reflections (2014 issue). He also won a Colorado Water Conservation Board scholarship to attend the 2014 Sustaining Colorado's Watersheds Conference.

Roaring Fork Campus Sustainability Successes (2013-14) SUSTAINABLE TRANSPORT:

• RFC has funded a free shuttle, called RIDE CMC, to ferry students, staff and faculty among its three locations (Spring Valley, Glenwood & Carbondale) several times per day. This service has been scheduled in coordination both with the RFTA (Roaring Fork Transportation Authority) schedule and with RFC’s course schedule. We also modelled fiscal sustainability in doing so: 1) we purchased the van at a steal of a bargain by procuring it as a decommissioned vehicle from a local ski resort; and 2) we staffed the driving of the van using existing staff. Students from our Graphic Design program created a snappy logo that will be painted on the side of the van:

• The Carbondale campus found funding to apply for a state grant to install an Electric Vehicle (EV) charging station at our Lappala Center, as part of our college-wide effort to lead the Colorado Rocky Mountain region in building EV charging infrastructure across our district. We also made sure to publicize our efforts with The Aspen Times and Post Independent, both of which covered the following story on 3/17/14: http://www.aspentimes.com/news/10612096-113/charging-electric-stations-carbondale

Adrian Fielder plugs in his Nissan Leaf at a charging station outside of Carbondale Town Hall. RFTA, CMC, Aspen and Glenwood Springs are preparing to install chargers.

WASTE MANAGEMENT:

• RFC organized a massive “road clean-up” event in September 2013 to pick up trash along County Rd 114, including the entire stretch from Highway 82 to our Spring Valley campus. Over two dozen residential students participated, in addition to over a dozen staff members (special thanks to Physical Plant, which provided transportation and hot cocoa!). By the end of the day, a full dump-truck-load of material (an estimated 2,000 lbs) was collected for disposal and recycling.

• The Lappala Center in Carbondale has updated its recycling bins and the waste disposal practices of its staff to align with the newest protocol of its recycling vendor.

• A storage facility at our Spring Valley campus, which had been used for over a decade to store old paperwork from multiple campuses around the CMC district, was recently cleaned out. As part of that effort, the defunct paperwork – totaling 4,000 pounds! – was shredded and composted.

WORKSHOPS & LECTURES:

• RFC invited our Steamboat campus’ Professor of Sustainability Studies Tina Evans to talk about her book, Occupy

Education: Living and Learning Sustainability, at the Spring Valley campus in October 2013. Faculty, staff and students from a variety of departments attended the event, as well as the Glenwood Springs Director of Denver University’s Masters in Social Work program.

LIBRARY RESOURCES:

• In honor of Dr. Evans’ talk, Academic Affairs purchased nine copies of her book so that attendees could read it before her talk, after which our librarians at Quigley Library (Spring Valley) distributed those copies to other libraries throughout the CMC district.

• The Quigley Library at Spring Valley acquired 85 new titles related to sustainability during 2013 for use by all CMC faculty, staff and students.

ENERGY EFFICIENCY:

• RFC installed a split-system chiller to serve the HVAC system in its Glenwood Springs building in September 2013, which immediately reduced our energy usage in that building to a very significant degree. How significant?

o Here is a screenshot from the Garfield Energy Navigator, showing our electricity usage (in kilowatt-hours) during the month following the installation of the new chiller to be 34% less (or 11,713 fewer kWh) than our electricity usage during the month prior to the installation:

o Our usage of natural gas (as measured in therms, a unit of heat energy equal to 100,000 BTUs) was reduced even more, by 42% (or 491.9 few THERMS):

• Utilizing the expertise of Arturo Mayo (Building Manager for our Glenwood and Carbondale sites), as well as robust input from our partners at CLEER (Clean Energy Economy for the Region), via the “Active Energy Management Reports” they produced for us, we have initiated a number of active energy management practices to maximize our energy efficiency in Glenwood and Carbondale, including:

1. Beginning Dec 2013, we have started to power down the chiller in our Lappala Center during periods

when it is not needed, resulting in 12% less electricity usage (or 284 fewer kWh) and 24% less natural gas consumption (or 68.5 fewer THERMS) in the first week after making this adjustment. See here for Energy Navigator screenshots showing these savings:

2. Beginning January 2014, we launched a room-specific, occupancy-oriented HVAC schedule in our Carbondale building, so that we are only heating/cooling rooms when they are being used (rather than the previous building-wide schedule that unnecessarily heated/cooled empty rooms). Also beginning January 2014, we adjusted our thermostats to give a wider “deadband” (i.e. the “neutral zone,” or the temperature range in which the HVAC system does not attempt either to heat or cool the building), to a four-degree zone (instead of its previous setting of two degrees). Below are two screenshots showing our energy savings following these two actions. Note in the THERMS reading that the outside temperature was higher on average during February than during January, which certainly attributes some of these savings to Mother Nature. On the other hand, since our semester did not start until January 13, our building was used considerably more in February than in January, so we achieved the following reductions while heating more space for more time than in the prior month: 15% less electricity (or 1,371 fewer kWh) and 35% less natural gas (or 299.3 THERMS)

3. On 3/11/14 at the Glenwood Center, we installed economizers (purchased from Automated Logic

Control) that make our HVAC system more efficient by ventilating with outside air during certain times of the year when cool air can be brought in from outside instead of being generated by our chiller using internal air. A week later, our electricity usage had already dropped by 16% (or 967 kWh) and our natural gas consumption had dropped by 28% (or 64.9 THERMS):

• Utilizing the expertise of our Physical Plant manager Aaron Sifuentes (whose work retrofitting the lighting at

The Little Nell hotel in Aspen is recounted in part in Auden Schendler’s book Getting Green Done), RFC is aggressively moving to a high-efficiency lighting paradigm:

Every time a light fixture with conventional ballast goes out, we replace it with one with high-efficiency ballast.

More than a dozen LEDs have already been installed in the interiors at the Lappala & Glenwood Centers, and more are scheduled to be installed in the Spring Valley parking lots.

Motion-sensored lighting has been installed in appropriate rooms around RFC. • The student lounge at our Carbondale building, as well as the entry vestibules of Sopris Residence Hall (at Spring

Valley) and of our Glenwood Center will all soon be graced by Energy Navigator dashboard monitors so that all these active energy management efforts can be tracked and their effects be made immediately transparent to the users of our buildings (and to anyone else who cares, via the world wide web).

• In May 2013, Sopris Residential Hall upgraded its laundry facilities exclusively to Energy Star-rated machines. Because this was done prior to the launch of the Garfield Energy Navigator at CMC locations, we do not yet have data available to measure this impact.

WATER MANAGEMENT:

• Spring Valley, as the only CMC location not connected to a municipal water supply, partnered with the Colorado Rural Water Association (CRWA) to create one of the state’s only Source Water Protection Plans.

• Our sprinklers at the Glenwood and Carbondale sites are now on a water-saving timer. Similar plans will be instituted by BASS graduate Rob Morrison next season at Spring Valley.

• Water-saving EcoBlue Cubes are installed in urinals at the Lappala and Glenwood Centers, which reduces water usage in urinals by over 99%.

PUBLIC RELATIONS & RECRUITMENT:

• We ran a booth at the City of Aspen’s event Aspen EcoFest during June 2013, in order to showcase our sustainability-related academic programs.

CMC at Aspen EcoFest June 2013

Sustainability Initiatives at RFC (2011-2013)

• Started the Bachelor of Arts in Sustainability Studies degree in the fall of 2011. Click here for Post Independent

story written during the second semester of the program (3/24/12). • Graduated our first cohort two years later, in May 2013.

• Hosted (at our Carbondale site) a “viewing party” for the live broadcast TEDx Manhattan’s January 2012

conference “Changing the Way We Eat,” followed by a community forum on How to Localize Our Foodshed, including participation by over 70 local farmers, food purveyors, community gardeners and other food activists.

• Organized a campus clean-up day and created the sculpture pictured below, using the trash collected the same day on Spring Valley campus, and installed the sculpture at a high-traffic location in order to draw attention to the litter issue on campus (April 2011).

Green Team Campus Clean-up, Earth Day 2011 • Implemented an “Adopt a Sustainable Behavior” project campus-wide. All employees with offices at any of our

three locations (GW, SV & CB) were invited to commit to at least one personal sustainability goal (e.g. “move to a paperless format for my classes”) and list their goals on a sheet of paper posted to their office door. During the weeks leading up to Earth Day 2011, sustainability ambassadors roamed the halls in search of these commitments, asked employees about their progress toward their goals, encouraged them to keep up their efforts (or to declare a commitment, if none were posted) and celebrated their accomplishments.

• Tried to implement composting of all organic waste from Spring Valley’s cafeteria, by creating a compost bin for cafeteria diners to place their organic waste, by building a space for an anaerobic compost pile and by enlisting the help of kitchen staff and physical plant staff. In the end, this project failed, due to the difficulties of getting the compost to cook down during the winter months, and the lack of adequate technical knowledge needed to accommodate that amount of compostable material. Once the wildlife started poking around the pile, we discontinued the project. But failure is an essential part of success, so we have listed this as an accomplishment despite the outcome of the project.

• Created and successfully implemented the GreenWorks Scholarship, an X-Prize-type competition open to RFC & Aspen students that awards a $500 scholarship to the student who successfully carries out a project that has the biggest demonstrated “green” impact on campus. For three years, this scholarship was awarded to three different students whose projects included: the collection of clothing from residential students at Spring Valley at the end of the school year and the donation of that clothing to families in need in the RF Valley; the creation and implementation of a discount on beverages to people who bring their own cup/mug to Spring Valley’s Eagle’s Nest café; and the organizing of an educational seminar, open to students and community members, about menstrual cups as a sustainable alternative feminine hygiene product (including the awarding of a free cup to one of the seminar participants). Although the scholarship has been successful for 3 years, it will be discontinued starting next year so that more effort can be placed on developing greater GreenTeam collaboration among RFC sites & departments, and especially among students, faculty and staff.

• Installed xeriscape gardens in Carbondale and Spring Valley in order to beautify campus, save water and educate our community about water conservation. The Spring Valley project is a simple demonstration garden that is not being duplicated elsewhere on campus. By contrast, the Carbondale site has not only installed such features but has adopted a xeriscaping paradigm for all its landscaping needs, using native, drought-tolerant plants that need very little water but give much love.

Xeriscaping project at Spring Valley, Earth Day 2011

• In Carbondale, which is not equipped with IVS, we collaborated with IT to pilot Movi, a desktop software that

interfaces with IVS, enabling Carbondale staff to participate in dozens of meetings without driving away from their home location. Examples include meetings for: International Programs committee, college-wide ESL program development, college-wide DevEd resdesign, college-wide Reg Users, Curriculum Advisory Committee, ILT, etc. In less than two years, this has already saved us hundreds of pounds of carbon, dozens of hours’ worth

of productivity that would otherwise have been lost to commutes, and has connected Carbondale to the larger CMC system more frequently and with more depth than ever before. For similar reasons, Carbondale has also requested that more meetings with colleagues at other locations be held via phone conferences, and has carpooled whenever off-campus trips are necessary.

• In direct response to GreenTeam student demand and in honor of the sustainability gestalt of our student body and wider community, Carbondale opted to disallow big monitors at our front desk, opting instead to convey the kind of info that normally gets broadcast on those monitors “the old-fashioned way,” via face-to-face communication.

• A cross-functional group consisting of BASS faculty/administrators, counselors and students (both CMC students and high school students) teamed up with Carbondale community members to install a food forest behind Roaring Fork HS to celebrate Earth Day 2013.

• Individuals and distinct contingents of the RFC BASS student cohort have successfully engaged our larger community in dozens of service-learning projects, including some worth credit in courses and some completely on a volunteer basis. Below are a few examples:

BASS student (and 2013 graduate) Kim Cassady engaged

her child’s school cafeteria in her effort to spread awareness of sustainable food choices.

Christyanne Melendez’ ENV-101 class teamed up with our BASS I.C. and the Town of Carbondale to host a “First Friday” community event at

Carbondale’s Third Street Center on a Friday evening (Oct 2012) designed to convince community members to adopt one sustainable behavior that each student researched in preparation for the event.

A large contingent of BASS students attended an open community forum in Carbondale (February 2013) to give the BLM, USFS and Pitkin County Commissioners feedback on the BLM’s decision about whether or not to extend a number of gas leases in the Thompson Divide,

an area of mostly public lands southwest of Carbondale. A number of BASS students and faculty spoke at the forum.

• Installed a ground-source heat pump to serve the hot-water needs of Sopris Residential Hall (Spring Valley). • The Lappala Center in Carbondale has adopted permaculture and xeriscaping paradigms for its landscaping

activities. • Building a greenhouse in Carbondale, in partnership with Roaring Fork High School, for use as lab space and

student test plots, and for connecting CMC to local high school students via dual-credit classes. • CMC Carbondale has formalized a partnership with the Town of Carbondale (and approved by the Town trustees) to

create a “food forest” and community garden space on municipal property adjacent to our Lappala Center.