A new campus program created through the University Sustainability Office is aiming to showcase various student, faculty and staff-led sustainability initiatives on and around campus. Begun in partnership with the Resources and Environment Committee in Staff Senate, Sustainability Partners hopes to offer monthly tours and showcases of sustainability projects spearheaded by both students and employees.
Carla Davis, the communications coordinator in the University Sustainability Office, is one of the organizers of the program tours. Davis hopes that the program will bring awareness to sustainability initiatives on campus.
“The purpose of the program is to raise awareness about sustainability,” Davis said. “Sustainability has so many different facets and topics and [Sustainability Partners] is meant to showcase different sides of that, so that people have a greater understanding of what it is, what it entails and maybe what they can do with it.”
The first tours took place on Friday morning, at the rooftop garden installed on Talley Student Union. According to Anne Spafford, associate teaching professor in the Department of Horticultural Science and one of those spearheading the rooftop garden project, the garden began officially last August when trays of soil were craned up onto the roof.
“We had a crew of students, staff and faculty spread the soil in the beds,” Spafford said on the tour. “In October we had our first planting day, and then we had another one at the end of April.”
Talley’s rooftop garden is composed of edible plants, as well as habitat plants for various pollinators that can ideally utilize the garden year-round. Spafford emphasized the need for as many different plants that bloom throughout the year as possible, to make the garden fully functional.
“So I’m a huge proponent of making every landscape we put in super functional,” Spafford said. “So that garden out there, it’s beautiful, but it has a much more important function of reducing runoff off the roof and providing habitat for the pollinators, hopefully giving the people who are in these university spaces something pleasing to look at; maybe it reduces their stress or relaxes them in some way.”
The Sustainability Partners program has two more tours lined up already for the coming months, according to the Sustainability Partners webpage. The next one will take place on July 24, where students and employees will get a tour of floating islands to improve water quality. This project was developed by graduate students and faculty in the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering. There will also be a tour in August of SolarPack, NC State’s solar-powered car racing team. The date is yet to be announced.
Davis said that although the program has initially been geared toward employees because of the sponsorship by Staff Senate, students are also encouraged to get involved. They can do so by signing up for the Sustainability Partners Listserv through their webpage and notifying program leaders about notable sustainability initiatives around campus.
“If people want to get involved, the easiest way is that we’ve set up a webpage and then a form people can fill out,” Davis said. “Anytime we can showcase that ‘Think and Do’ spirit that we have and merge that with sustainability — I’m hopeful that that’s the kind of stuff we’ll be able to showcase as a part of this program.”
