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The ACS Environmental Initiative encompasses a two-pronged strategy to raise the level of environmental consciousness at each of our 16 institutions. First, we recruit students, faculty, and staff at each campus who act as environmental liaisons. These key players help us make real strides towards changing the campus culture, thereby improving our collective environmental citizenship. The ACSEI team leads the way, raising green consciousness on their campuses and acting as liaisons for our many environmental activities.
In addition to our 16 individual campus teams, we support several inter-institutional programs, including three alliances that focus on various aspects of academic and extracurricular environmental issues. The Curriculum and Faculty Development Alliance, Student Development and Engagement Alliance, and Campus-Community Partnerships Alliance offer grants to faculty, students, and staff.
Since January 2002, over $405,000 has been awarded by ACS environmental
alliances for 212 grants to students, faculty, and staff wishing to
create projects that help move their campus and other ACS institutions
towards better environmental citizenship. We estimate that over 6000
ACS faculty, students, and staff, and several hundred members of the
surrounding communities, have been affected by the many projects and
activities ACSEI has sponsored or supported.
Curriculum & Faculty Development grants this past year supported two new
interdisciplinary environmental studies intros and a capstone course
inaugurating a new minor; an interdisciplinary science-English course; a
world lit and the environment course; four new international courses,
including one in environmental policy course; collaborative research
with scholars in South Africa; and Flash media training.
Student Development & Engagement grants in '05-'06 supported three
teaching assistantships in at Rollins College and Rhodes College. They
also supported eleven student internships in central Kentucky, Denali
National Park, the Chesapeake Bay, and the forests and farmlands of
Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau.
And in its first year, the Campus-Community Partnerships alliance
awarded grants to support a service learning module in a first-year
seminar at Trinity; an experiential native landscaping component in a
course on park planning in central Florida; a cavity nesting bird study
project in North Carolina; signage for an ecoscape in Alabama; a
community gate to keep out illegal dumping in a Memphis neighborhood;
and a series of educational activity boxes for elementary teachers
taking their classes to a wildlife refuge in central Kentucky.
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Since October 2001, ACS Environmental Programs has hosted or helped to
support twenty-two workshops, conferences and symposia addressing various
aspects of environmental citizenship. At little or no cost to the
individual or to the campuses, these workshops have given almost 800 ACS
faculty, students and staff an opportunity to learn about, be engaged
in, and be motivated by their peers' environmental courses and research,
by co-curricular environmental programs, and by the many environmental
partnerships and projects that have been created, implemented, and
strengthened due to ACS alliance grants. For more information on our
workshops, please see the Upcoming Conference link above under Hot
Environmental News, and go to our Past Workshops/Conferences page.
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ACS 10th Anniversary Trees
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In
honor of our tenth anniversary as a consortium, the ACS gave
a tree to each of our member campuses. |
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Participants at the 2006
Fellows & Interns Conference. |
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