Lunch Meeting from Tuesday, September 3rd 2013

What Happened: Today was a first informal meeting of minds sharing an interest in sustainability. There were five total attendees from very different backgrounds and levels of involvement.

Why: While a more formal meeting might get more done, the informal setting can happen under the pretense that people just like to share ideas. More importantly, sharing ideas just to do it is something that is strongly encouraged with the right motives in mind.

Details: This meeting was a follow up on an idea to improve the interconnectivity of “Green Teams.” These teams vary in scale as much as they do in internal organization and both currently exist throughout the community or will come into being in the near future.

Hopefully, the ideas that these meeting produce will be implemented to help each group become more aware of the rest. As put forward by an attendee, it should be a goal to eliminate the “reinvention of the wheel” for our community’s idea of sustainable culture.

Next Steps: The discussion was very geared toward the ability to get larger groups of people involved. The collaboration with officials that have knowledge of the given subject a team is associated with is essential, but the ability of a group to create incentive that hits home with your average consumer is tantamount to getting sustainability to take off. The idea was put forth of a virtual tracking system that showed a goal and its progress or assigned points to community members for involvements within goals, as such ideas have been successful in the past.

However, getting systems like this off the ground require getting people excited, and the idea of a goal or nominal reward is not enough. Well laid out systems must be designed.

Education: Along the lines of what is being sought after for these meetings is the education of the public of how they can get involved. We heard today about a lot of the ways that these teams are already interconnected in ways that your general resident likely has no clue about. Two examples are given below:

Learning IN Community, or LINC courses. These classes often are in a sustainable strain of thinking and are offered as a way to get students involved with local associations. Link provided in comprehensive list.

The Extention Progams. These are specific to land grant schools, such as UIUC, that attempt to focus on teaching, research and outreach. Link provided in comprehensive list.

I may need some help defining all the Green Teams that were mapped out today but a comprehensive list is a good first step. Please find the startings of one below:

• Campus Bike Shop (CBS) or The Bike Project (TBP) Link

• Students for Environmental Concerns (SECS) Link

• Engineering Department

  • CEE398PBL Link

    • Bike Signage

  • ENG315: Learning in Community (LINC) Link

• School of Earth Society and Environment (ESE) Link

  • ESE360OCE: Environmental Writing

• Student Sustainability Committee (SSC) Link

  • Land

  • Water

  • Energy

  • Food and Waste

  • Education

  • Transportation

• Center for a Sustainable Environment (CSE) Link

• Champaign County Sustainable Network (CCNet) Link

• Illinois Green Business Association (IGBA) Link

• Smart Energy Design Assistance Center (SEDAC) Link

• The Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC) Link

• ESC?

Additional points of contact that should be considered among lines of contact:

• Illinois Student Senate (ISS)

• City of Urbana

• City of Champaign

• Champaign County

• Illinois State Geologic Survey (ISGS)

• Federal Farm Bureau