Experiences from U.S. campus activism

Experiences from U.S. campus activism
By: Kat Cooley and Cathy Kunkel

This year, there are a number of young American environmentalists living and working in Beijing and around China. We, Kat Cooley in Chengdu and Cathy Kunkel in Beijing, have been lucky enough to get involved in Chinese student environmental groups and we’ve been very excited to learn more about your work and activities. It’s been such a wonderful experience for us to share ideas with the groups that we’ve been working with, we thought the least we could do is share with a wider Chinese audience some of our experiences doing student environmental work back home.

Kat Cooley is a graduate of Middlebury College in Vermont, where she worked with the Sunday Night Group, a student group focusing on climate change. Cathy Kunkel is a graduate of Princeton University in New Jersey, where she worked with Greening Princeton, a student group focusing more broadly on green campus activities.

Green campus activities are very popular on U.S. campuses; such activities encompass anything from convincing the university to purchase 100% recycled paper to advocating for more local and organic foods to persuading the university to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. But it is particularly the latter category – global warming activism – that has dominated U.S. student environmental groups’ activities for the last several years.

Broad student concern and activism on climate change led to the formation of the Campus Climate Challenge, a coordinated effort across the United States and Canada to organize students to advocate for clean energy policies at their schools. The Campus Climate Challenge is a project of Energy Action, a coalition of more than 30 US & Canadian youth organizations formed in 2003. The purpose of forming this coalition was to strengthen the student environmental movement in the US by bringing the many different organizations together to work towards a common goal, recognizing that climate change is the greatest challenge faced by our generation.

The role of the Campus Climate Challenge (CCC) is to assist campus groups in running campaigns on their campuses, by organizing trainings and conferences, providing materials, and providing a supportive community of fellow activists. The CCC encourages 3 types of campaigns: renewable energy purchasing, energy efficiency and conservation, and transportation. To convince their school administrations to purchase renewable energy, some student groups have won the support of the student body to increase student fees by only a few dollars per student per year; this extra money goes into a fund to allow the college to purchase renewable energy. Other groups have advocated for the installation of solar panels or wind turbines at their university. Energy efficiency campaigns range from organizing competitions between different dormitories to see who can reduce energy consumption the most to persuading the university to adopt higher energy efficiency standards for new construction. Transportation campaigns can involve advocating for innovative ways to encourage staff to use public transportation, rather than cars, to commute to campus.

There have been many campus victories so far in the CCC, although we still have a long way to go. For example, a student campaign persuaded the California State University Board of Trustees, which oversees all public universities in the state of California, to require all of these universities to purchase renewable energy to meet 20% of their electricity demand by 2010. In 2005, Yale University committed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 10% below 1990 levels by 2020, which represents a 43% reduction below 2004 levels.

Lessons we’ve learned

Many lessons can be learned from the successes and failures of student environmental campaigns in the US. In this section, we want to present a few of our ideas and suggestions, drawn from our experiences working on green campus projects at Middlebury and Princeton.

A. Effective organizations
The key to attracting and retaining membership in any organization is making sure that there’s always useful work for new members to do. For example, Greening Princeton, is currently working on projects ranging from organizing educational events to bringing more local food to campus to improving recycling, and it is very easy for new members to propose their own projects. As a result, Greening Princeton has a very loose organizational structure. The only fixed position is the president; other positions (event or campaign coordinators) come and go as the organization’s activities change.

B. Effective campaigns
One of the most important first steps to running a good campaign is to understand the culture of your campus and what it is possible to do, and then to decide on realistic goals and tactics. Princeton is a rather conservative campus, where it is very rare for students to protest anything. So our approach with Greening Princeton was to be very non-confrontational and to work with the administration to convince them to do things our way. Most of our work was accomplished in meetings with administrators and in the behind-the-scenes research that we did to prepare for those meetings.

Another important point is to build as many relationships as possible with other campus organizations and with professors. For example, at Princeton we realized that the administration would probably not commit to goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions without significant research showing that it would be possible and not extremely expensive to do so. So we worked with professors to create a course in which the students did this background research and then wrote a report to the administration.

Case Study: Middlebury College Sunday Night Group

The Middlebury College Sunday Night Group (SNG) was initiated by a group of students who wanted to be more active on issues of climate change on campus. This group of students agreed to start meeting every Sunday night; initially the group had about 15-20 members. We all know that university students are very busy, and sometimes when group leaders get busy with schoolwork a group stops working effectively, so the Middlebury students decided to create a group with more flexible leadership. The SNG has no president or secretary. At the beginning of the semester, the group has a brainstorming session in which everyone brings their ideas for what the group could work on. Sometimes the list of potential projects is organized by time frame (this month, this semester, or this year) and sometimes it is organized by location (campus, community, state, or nation). Then students vote on the list of potential projects and one student or a group of students agrees to lead each of the most popular projects. At subsequent meetings, the larger SNG breaks down into smaller teams that focus on planning each project. In this way, the leadership is distributed, and every student feels a sense of ownership in the projects that they’re working on. We think it is this feeling of ownership that keeps volunteers excited and involved, and also prevents the group from falling apart when some students get very busy with other work.  In addition, it is easy for volunteers to shift from a less urgent project to help out groups that need more manpower for immediate tasks. Using this organizational structure, the SNG has done meaningful on-campus activities, including: a successful lightbulb exchange, a campaign to switch the campus vehicle fleet to run on bio-diesel, numerous awareness-raising activities, a socially responsible investment campaign, and a campaign to bring more local food to the dining halls. SNG has also sent representatives to international conferences and worked with national organizations like the Campus Climate Challenge to organize national-level campaigns.
注：Kat Cooley与Cathy Kunkel受绿色大学生论坛（GSF）邀请，介绍美国地区学生环保活动，特撰此文。在此，GSF真诚感谢她们对中国学生环保活动的关注与支持。


Resources:
Middlebury College Sunday Night Group: http://community.middlebury.edu/~cri/SNG/sng_home.htm
Greening Princeton: www.princeton.edu/~greening
Campus Climate Challenge: www.climatechallenge.org (See, in particular the Campus Climate Challenge Toolkit, a guide for how to start working for clean energy at your school http://www.climatechallenge.org/documents/toolkit_2.0.pdf)
“New Energy for Campuses”, a report describing different strategies for renewable energy, energy efficiency, and transportation campaigns on campuses: http://www.energyaction.net/documents/new_energy.pdf
“It’s Getting Hot in Here”, a blog about the youth climate movement in North America:
www.itsgettinghotinhere.org
Cathy Kunkel (cathykunkel@gmail.com) and Kat Cooley (katharine.cooley@gmail.com): please email us with any questions