Newfoundland!
Hey! We’re all back from Newfoundland, and it was sweet! Ask us and we’ll tell you loads, but for now you can look at our funding letter that we wrote to all of the wonderful departments that gave us money.
We would like to thank you for your funding to send us four to the Sustainable Campuses Atlantic Conference. The Sustainable Campuses project is a part of the Sierra Youth Coalition designed to implement the values and lobbying the Coalition does in the form of policy at the high school and university level. For the past 4 years, the Atlantic chapter of the organization has hosted a conference with the aim of networking university environmental leaders and providing a forum for discussion on environmental issues in the region.
This year the conference featured keynote addresses by Elizabeth Weir, CEO of Energy Efficiency New Brunswick and Robert O’Brien, director of OceanNET, as well as four sets of workshops focusing mainly on projects that can be undertaken at the university level to engage students or improve university sustainability. The four Acadia representatives attended workshops on Water and Sanitation in the Third World, Success in Lobbying, Community Gardens, Media Relations, Environmentalism and the Developing World, Composting, Regional Waste Management, Group Communication and Electronic Waste.
From this extensive list, conference attendees launched into a Regional Strategizing session to identify areas where interuniversity action could be beneficial. Committees were formed on topics such as Sustainable Curricula, Bottled Water and Residence Challenges. This facilitated relationships to other universities and provided a network through which to organize regional action.
This trip would not have been possible without funding from the Student Activities Fund to help cover the considerable cost associated with transportation to St. John’s, Newfoundland and the conference registration fee. Having four representatives from Acadia did add to the expense, but because of this we were able to draw considerably more from multiple workshops in the same timeslot, as well as solidify Acadia University’s commitment to university sustainability.
Thank you again,
Jenn Herrick
Dewey Dunnington
Amy Buckland-Nicks
James Patterson