The Big Ten and Friends Sustainability group is collaborating on a Prospectus about how sustainability helps the universities accomplish several of their missions.  Each participating school was asked to note their high-level and visionary goal for the Prospectus and the Big Ten group as a whole.  Sustainability staff at UIUC offered the following goals:

What are your goals for using the outcomes of the Big Ten Prospectus at your institution?  “The University of Illinois Provost Office (budgetary authority) is interested in evaluating the appropriate funding model for our sustainability efforts, and we hope to use the outcomes from the Prospectus to help inform them about the importance and benefit of the overall sustainability efforts, and how it ties directly to the campus mission.”

What potential (think big!) do you see for our network as a whole?  How can this work help us leverage regional impacts, move all of our institutions forward, etc.? “We have been making great strides in sustainability, but campus continues to elevate other mission priorities over sustainability when achieving these goals is considered cumbersome or unfeasible. We hope that through this Prospectus, the Big Ten and, subsequently, campuses across the nation will see that sustainability is a mission-critical goal, and will not proceed with any action until it can be made sustainable. Could we also partner on various efforts, from Carbon Credits to recycled paper purchases to RECs, etc. to save money and effort? We should also update the website at http://greenbigten.msu.edu/index.html and https://wikispaces.psu.edu/display/Big10EnvStew/Big+Ten+Environmental+St....”