New Program Changing Environmental Culture on Campus

Monday, March 20th, 2006

A new program is out to change Duke's culture when it comes to environmentally friendly behavior. You may have already met the interns in the Students for Sustainable Living team (SSL). They've been busy creating a buzz on campus this semester.

If a student has approached you about trying out Duke's newest "green dining" café, or turning off lights when they are not in use, or greening your lab, or using alternative transportation, or reducing waste, more than likely, you were talking to a member of the SSL team.

And if you haven't met an SSL student yet, don't worry. They are just getting started.

Already, the results are impressive. When the team handed out free samples from the Divinity School Refectory, sales at the "green" café went up 125% and have remained high. When Duke entered the Recyclemania Competition, the team got the word out, recruiting hall captains from every floor of every dorm in the process. When the students stood at the entrance of commuter parking lots in the early hours of the work day and handed out information about vanpooling, the phone started ringing at the Triangle Transit Authority.

"When it comes to culture and behavior change, there is nothing more effective than one-on-one engagement," says Sam Hummel, Duke's Environmental Sustainability Coordinator and initiator of the program.

One thing that is unique about the SSL program is that it aims to engage the whole campus community. Some projects focus on reaching staff, while others focus on faculty or students, and some aim to engage a mix of all those groups.

Getting Involved

There are currently 8 students on the SSL team. The team meets for one hour on Monday nights to prepare for the week's project. The students work 3 hours each week carrying out the project in pairs, as a team or on their own time.

"As soon as we got started, these passionate and energetic students began taking the lead," says Hummel, "Now, our job is just to help get things set up so they can be the environmental ambassadors they want to be."

Vanessa Barnett-Loro, a Duke student taking a semester off from classes, has done much of the behind-the-scenes project coordination to this point. Every project requires a lot of planning, materials preparation and verification to measure the project's success.

Tavey McDaniel, Duke's new Outreach & Communications Coordinator for Sustainability, will be running the program beginning next semester when Vanessa goes back to school. She will be sorely missed!

McDaniel is already looking for energetic students for next year. "Students that are interested in being on the team next year should go ahead and let me know now because we want to hit the ground running next semester," she says, "It will be important to set the tone for the whole school year."

Culture Change Strategy

The SSL team's outreach projects are anchored by the community-based social marketing strategies laid out in Dr. Doug McKenzie-Mohr's ground-breaking book Fostering Sustainable Behavior.

Since the earliest days of the environmental movement, proponents of sustainability have been asking themselves the same challenging question: how can we get people to be more conscious and conscientious of the impact their actions have on the natural world?

For the past several decades the majority of environmental activists' time, energy, and resources, it seems, have been dedicated to lobbying (to affect the political process) and large-scale public education campaigns (to establish an informed electorate).

In recent years however, people have begun to embrace an alternative social marketing approach that may signify a return to the environmental movement's grassroots origins.

Dr. McKenzie-Mohr, a psychologist by training, attributes the environmental movement's paradigm shift "to a growing understanding that programs which rely heavily on media advertising can be effective in creating public awareness and understanding of issues related to sustainability, but are limited in their ability to foster behavior change."

Instead, says McKenzie-Mohr, "initiatives to promote behavior change are often most effective when they are carried out at the community level and involve direct contact with people."