Green Mountain Center for Sustainability at Prescott College

Why a Green Mountain Center for Sustainability at Prescott College?

Written by Laird Christensen, Co-Director of the Green Mountain Center for Sustainability

In August 2019 the Prescott College community welcomed more than 150 students, faculty, and staff from Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vermont. Those of us who made the long trek from the leafy Taconic Mountains are grateful for the reception we’ve received here in the piney Central Highlands of Arizona, and we’re pleased to help create a nurturing space for both current Prescott students and Green Mountain College alumni—online and on campus, in the Sustainability Lounge of Cicada Hall.

With its long tradition of environmental education and emphasis on social justice, Prescott College is a natural place to carry on the work of Green Mountain College. Courses of study for undergraduates include adventure education, sustainable community development, environmental studies, and social justice and community organizing. The graduate programs already at Prescott, such as a PhD in Sustainability Education, are now bolstered by successful MS programs from Green Mountain College, such as Sustainable Food Systems, Environmental Studies, and Resilient and Sustainable Communities.

So what exactly is the role of the Green Mountain Center for Sustainability at Prescott College? Besides the basic work of supporting students and alumni, and building a sense of community on campus and beyond, the Green Mountain Center will continue to provide leadership, locally and nationally, in promoting an approach to education based on finding solutions to the problems that arise from cultural systems and practices that are simply not sustainable. In one form or another, it’s the essential work of our time.

Sustainability Leadership at GMC

Founded in 1834 at the Troy Conference Academy, Green Mountain College went through a number of transformations before finally adopting an environmental liberal arts mission in 1996. The idea was that the general education courses that made up a third of a student’s courses--history, science, English, and all the other fields you might expect from a liberal arts education--would be taught in ways that reflect critically on interactions between humans and their environments. Not surprisingly, it took awhile for the culture to catch up with the college’s aspirations.

When I began teaching at GMC in 2000, the environmental mission was very much in the process of redefining the institution. Some students still came to be close to ski resorts at Killington and Stratton Mountain, while others were drawn by the beauty of the countryside or distinctive majors such as Therapeutic Recreation. In 2002 the intellectual atmosphere on campus was shaken up in the best of ways by the arrival of dozens of students from Goddard College, a famously progressive institution which was forced to close its residential undergraduate programs. 

By 2005 many students were coming to GMC specifically for the school’s environmental reputation, and respected scholars from around the country sought out positions on the faculty. We began offering sustainability-themed graduate programs in 2006, but it was our students who led the way as we installed a locally sourced biomass plant for heating and energy, and convinced our Board of Trustees to divest from companies profiting from fossil fuels. We were on the right path. Residential enrollment grew to its highest point right up until the Great Recession in the 2007-08 academic year, and enrollment continued to grow in graduate programs until the very end. 

Green Mountain College cemented its position as a national leader in educating for sustainability over the last decade: our rural campus became carbon neutral in 2011 and we were consistently in the top ten of Sierra Club’s “Coolest schools” (including #1 in 2010 and 2018). Our curriculum was ranked at the very top by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) in the college’s last two years, receiving the highest scores ever awarded. 

However, none of that was enough to prevent its closure in June of 2019, after 185 years anchoring the Main Street of Poultney.

Becoming Part of Prescott College

The irony is lost on no one that the nation’s leader in sustainability education proved unable to survive. To judge from the comments in the Wall Street Journal, some readers concluded that it was the very model of educating for sustainability that was to blame for the college closing. In fact, the number of colleges featuring sustainability in their curriculum has multiplied from just a handful in 2006 to over 400 today, including Cornell University, Bard College, Emory University, and state universities across the country. 

No, Green Mountain College was done in by a combination of factors. Undergraduate enrollment began to drop off during the Great Recession, when many parents and students felt they could no longer afford tuition at a private liberal arts college. This was followed by a demographic slump that led to a ten-year decline in first-time student enrollments, hitting Northeastern colleges much harder than other parts of the country. 

The lessons we learned along the way, however, are more important than ever. Like our colleagues here at Prescott College, we recognize the need for an approach to higher education based on finding solutions to “wicked problems”—those that resist simple solutions—in the age of climate crisis, systematic inequities, and growing economic disparity. 

We are excited to spread the seeds of sustainability, both through projects here in Prescott and as far as we can through the reach of the internet. Below are a few goals of the Green Mountain Center for Sustainability that we are especially excited about:

• Here on campus we have created the Sustainability Lounge to help GMC transfer students adjust to a very different environment, building a sense of community and an emphasis on social sustainability in collaboration with other student groups.
• We are working with students through clubs, classes, and work-study opportunities to improve energy efficiency and waste reduction: current projects include campus-wide composting, education around waste sorting, and even a Free Store in the Susty Lounge.
• We are celebrating alumni and creating mentoring networks that serve undergraduates, graduate students, and alumni; we welcome your participation and ideas about how to make these processes most effective.
• We have begun work on creating a clearinghouse of resources built on our bioregional approach to distance education, allowing students and professionals to use GIS technology to link to local organizations, agencies, and opportunities with a click on a map.

And that’s just a start. Yes, we still feel the loss of our home in Vermont, but it makes things so much easier when we look around Prescott College and see so many familiar faces from GMC: people like Mark Dailey and Eleanor Tison, Robin Currey, and Bill Prado. Others, such as Meriel Brooks, Bill Throop, and Chris Brooks continue to teach online and join us on campus for occasional residencies.

We are honored to help carry on the legacy of Green Mountain College here--but I’ve come to realize that all of us are engaged in the same good work, wherever we are, whenever we share something promising from the lives we learned to live at the end of Main Street in Poultney, Vermont.

A heartfelt welcome to all of our alumni!

If you’ve ever seen the movie, Dead Poets Society, you may remember the scene where the teacher, played by Robin Williams, leads his class out to look at a display of group photographs taken of students a century earlier. In the film, as the students look on, the camera slowly zooms in on the faces in those old black-and-white photos.

“They’re not that different from you, are they?” Williams asks. Indeed, it’s not so hard to imagine more recent versions of those same faces sitting beside us in Withey Hall—maybe pierced and a little shaggier, though, dressed in Carhartts and Phish shirts.

They’re “food for worms, “ says Williams, “fertilizer for daffodils.” The lesson, of course, is carpe diem: our lives are fleeting, so we’d best make the most of them.

It’s a lesson we may have learned in many ways, whether as the Second Law of Thermodynamics or through the compost we helped spread on the fields of Cerridwen Farm.

But like that compost—an analogy that’s more likely to play to this crowd than others—there’s no doubt we’re going to continue to do good work, to enrich our environments, even after we’re done with these bodies. Because the lessons we learned through our own quirky brand of education are too big to keep to ourselves.

We’ve seen those lessons ripple out from the lives you have chosen, whether your choices led you to the statehouse or the classroom, the farm or the front lines of direct action. And then there are your subtler influences, the difference you’ve made in the lives of your children, friends, or even strangers who notice an act of kindness from you, a willingness to help out, a thoughtfulness about the consequences of your actions. You’ve made us proud.

Let’s keep those ripples spreading.

One way to continue the legacy of Green Mountain College is to help you pass along all that you've learned, both from your education and life experiences. An essential element of the Green Mountain Center for Sustainability at Prescott College is to create opportunities for our alumni to serve as mentors for our undergraduates and graduate students. At this point, we're looking at a variety of other systems to serve alumni and current students, and we’d love to hear any suggestions you might have.

But we're also interested in creating professional networking opportunities that will serve all of you: after all, there are thousands of you out there making a difference in the world. We’d love to help put you in touch, whether through online resources or regional gatherings. If you’re active in one of the GMC alumni groups, we’d love to help support those communities, too! Please take a minute to complete a short form that will help us build these connections. In one way or another we’d love to hear from you!

Best wishes from Prescott, and lux fiat!

Sustainability Spotlights

Living on the Pacific Coast of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, Tia Allen (MS ‘21) has found a way to combine her role as a tribal member of the Quinault Indian Nation with her work for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Whether monitoring suspended particulates on the reservation or writing grants for air purification equipment, her work as the Air Quality Program Coordinator contributes directly to the well being of her community. Read more
 

We’re excited to share the news that Professor Eleanor Tison has been appointed Co-Director of The Green Mountain Center for Sustainability at Prescott College. She joins Laird Christensen in overseeing the work of the center, focusing mostly on the activities, events, and service that take place on and around the Prescott campus. Anyone who has previously worked with Eleanor knows what a remarkable force she is in motivating students and other members of the community to put their values to work! Read more
 

When students returned to campus for the fall 2020 semester, a waft of remembrance filled the air as they walked past the Terrace Garden behind the library. In honor of the indigenous peoples that originally inhabited and cultivated these lands, plants first domesticated in the Americas were budding to a harvest. This article highlights how students enrolled in the Agroecology course taught by Eleanor Tison develop the design and theme for this space each spring. Read more

Annie Baker '21 has recently started a newly-created position at Prescott College—Sustainability Coordinator—through the Arizona Serve program. In this new role,  Annie will assess sustainability practices on campus, develop proposals for improvements, and build social sustainability by  engaging community members. In addition, she is collaborating with other organizations and programs to support individuals in the larger community who find themselves in need, underserved, or underrepresented. Read more
 

Charlie Harcourt, a graduate of Green Mountain College (with a BA in secondary education in History) and Prescott College (MA in Education) feels that his education has helped him to shed the layers of social conditioning that taught him to place undue value on material things, wealth, and consumerism. Read more

Melissa Markstrom '09 GMC - While halfway around the world, working with the Masai in Kenya on an EcoLeague exchange with Prescott College, Melissa Markstrom found herself learning lessons that would shape her future work in unexpected ways. Read more

These days there’s so much activity buzzing around the Sustainability Center that it may be hard to imagine Cicada Hall as a mostly vacant space as recently as the summer of 2019. There were a couple of offices being used in the farthest corner of the building, but otherwise it was just a place where old furniture, boxes of files, and lots of shelving were piled up, gathering dust.  

It may not have looked especially promising to the students, faculty, and staff from Green Mountain College who arrived here that August of that year, but we were so grateful for the opportunity to carry on the legacy of our Vermont campus that we accepted the challenge and, with the help of Provost Paul Burkhardt, began clearing space for what would soon become the Green Mountain Center for Sustainability at Prescott College.

Creating such a center on the corner of Sheldon and Grove Avenue helped ease the transition for 150 students who transferred after the closure of Green Mountain College, which had served many thousands of students over its 185 years of existence. But it also allowed those of us who migrated west from Vermont to integrate lessons from our time living and working in an institution that was a national leader in sustainability education. We brought with us to Prescott a number of academic programs,  including the MS in Resilient and Sustainable Communities, the MS in Sustainable Food Systems, the MS in Environmental Studies, the MBA in Sustainability Leadership, and BA and BS degrees in Sustainable Food Systems. 

But as faculty and students from Green Mountain College became part of the Prescott College community, we found ourselves working with new colleagues and classmates through the Green Mountain Center for Sustainability. What follows is a list of some of our most memorable achievements over the past three years. We look forward to adding to this in years to come!

The Sustainability Center in Cicada Lounge 

Prescott College repurposed an empty building, Cicada hall, as the Green Mountain Center for Sustainability, featuring a popular new common space, the Sustainability Lounge. This space is designated for club meetings, campus events and activities, work stations, recycling demonstration units, a new water-refill station, sewing machines, sign-making and painting supplies, reusable utensils and bowls for community lunches, an E-waste disposal site, and a campus Free Store stocked with donations from students and community members. The Free Store has now evolved into a weekly event called Free Store Friday, where free meals are prepared by students. 

Sustainability Coordinator Position 

In Fall of 2020, Prescott College developed an AmeriCorps VISTA position to serve as Sustainability Coordinator for Prescott College, which students voted as their top priority among proposed sustainability initiatives. The first person to hold this position was Annie Baker, a GMC transfer student who is currently earning a MS in Resilient and Sustainable Communities at Prescott College. Annie was succeeded by Zachary Czuprynski, who has been a leader in improving sustainability on campus and guiding the STARS self-assessment process through the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (see below). 

Sustainability Club and Prescott College Garden and Compost Work-Study 

On-campus groups such as the Sustainability Club (SC) and the Prescott College Garden and Compost (PCGC) work-study crew have utilized the Sustainability Lounge for a variety of activities, including campus meetings to prioritize uses of student sustainability fees and regular gatherings to help direct the efforts of the Green Mountain Center in improving sustainable practices on campus (i.e. composting, recycling, waste audits, etc). Both the SC and PCGC have also made sustainable practices a reality through their work in the community gardens and leading student events and activities. 

Sustainability Funding 

An early priority was to create a revised and simplified process for awarding grants to students from the campus Sustainability Fund. Successful grants have included bike repair facilities, a chipper to process pine needles for compost, supplies for the community gardens, a chicken run, and a three-bin recycling demonstration station. The SC and PCGC have been working to make these grants more accessible to students with innovative ideas for projects in sustainability on campus, and assignments in some courses actually ask students to craft proposals for these funds. 

Composting Systems 

Since the arrival of Green Mountain College, Prescott College has made huge progress in strengthening the composting systems on campus. This has been made possible by the PCGC work-study crew, which has created an on-campus compost pick-up program. All food waste can now be returned back into the gardens for sustainable food production on campus. More work in this area is being developed by students as senior capstone projects and independent studies. Now food scraps are collected bi-weekly from our on-campus housing complex, as well as our campus dining cafe. 

Community Gardens 

Alongside our improvements in composting, the SC and PCGC have revitalized three community garden spaces across campus, incorporating lessons in Southwest food cultivation and preparation through immersive courses, student volunteer activities, and community gatherings. The veggies from these gardens have provided the community with free meals at campus events, such as Free Store Fridays and the annual Fall Harvest Festival. 

Community Building through Events 

The Green Mountain Center for Sustainability has been working to foster community and social sustainability by hosting events during the academic year. Some of these events include Earth Week, climate marches, the Fall Harvest Festival, Free Store Fridays, ongoing film and documentary screenings on sustainability topics, clothing swaps, music jams, periodic food pantries, the Prescott College EcoChallenge, and DIY workshops (i.e. mask-making, plant hangers, holiday gift-making, repurposing, etc). 

Community Building through Better Communications 

Students and staff from the Green Mountain Center for Sustainability have taken the lead in helping build a sustainable sense of community by communicating information, both on the campus and beyond, through a variety of venues. Aside from emails, newsletters, and social media posts from the administration, Prescott College previously offered few opportunities for sharing news about student activities and campus events. Student workers and the Sustainability Coordinator began by creating a Sustainability Guide to Prescott College, and followed up by publishing sustainability updates through a student-initiated website, The Prickly Press. The Green Mountain Center is also responsible for outreach through its own webpage, which features regular Sustainability Spotlights, and through a dedicated Facebook page. Since 2021, the Sustainability Coordinator also sends out monthly emails containing updates and tips, called Sustainability Snippets.

Community Building through Organizing and Networking

As a way of building community beyond the campus, the Green Mountain Center has created alliances with local school groups and a number of community activist organizations, including Prescott Slow Food, Northern Arizona Climate Change Alliance, Prescott Farmers Market, Prescott Community Compost Program, and PROTECT (Planning the Resilience of Our Towns, Environment, Climate, and Tourism). Because the Sustainability Coordinator’s position is funded in part through Americorps VISTA, a part of the coordinator’s role is specifically to encourage outreach and support to other members of the community, especially those in need. 

Sustainability Tracking Assessment and Rating Systems (STARS)

Under the leadership of Zach Czuprynski, our current Sustainability Coordinator, Prescott College has just completed a process of institutional self-assessment and reporting on our progress toward achieving sustainability through the Sustainability Tracking Assessment and Rating System (STARS), sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). In addition to helping demonstrate a public commitment to sustainability, the STARS reporting will help us identify areas of further improvement in the years to come.