At a glance
The Sustainable Education Initiative is a student-led RSO working to establish a 3-credit sustainability general education… Read full summary
- Funding received
- 2024-2025
- Mini
- Awarded
- $4,560
- Funding partners
-
- Services and Activities Fee (SAF)
The Sustainable Education Initiative is a student-led RSO working to establish a 3-credit sustainability general education requirement for all UW Seattle undergraduates. Partnering with faculty and the Office of Educational Assessment, the group is collecting data on student interest and current course enrollment to demonstrate feasibility. By integrating sustainability into the curriculum, the Initiative aims to ensure that all students graduate with the knowledge and skills necessary to address pressing social, environmental, and economic challenges.
The Sustainable Education Initiative is a student group with the goal of implementing a 3-credit sustainability general education requirement for all undergraduate students on UW Seattle’s campus. We are an RSO that started this year and have built up our officer board, RSO members, and relationships with faculty all over campus to help share our mission. We are using the UN definition of sustainability, but that definition will likely evolve over time to best serve student needs. As the concept of sustainability is a growing trend across industries and disciplines, future generations are expected to have the appropriate knowledge on sustainability and related topics. However, through our initial survey, our team noticed that students don’t feel prepared or informed enough on such topics. Thus, by implementing a mandatory Sustainability credit, we hope to prepare students for future opportunities that involve sustainability, regardless of their major. Furthermore, lived experience has influenced the creation of this project through conversations with students and faculty of the University who have a desire to incorporate sustainability into more contexts. Students want to learn about sustainability and incorporate it into their careers but don’t have a requirement to do so, so it is not prioritized.
After connecting with faculty and researching similar initiatives, both successful and otherwise, we have realized the importance of data in achieving this goal. We need to know if this is something that the student body wants as our goal is to serve them. This data is also necessary for convincing faculty and leadership to make this a requirement. Therefore, we have connected with the Office of Educational Assessment to create a survey. OEA is housed in the Office of Undergraduate Affairs, and they provide a variety of evaluation and assessment services. For us, they would be able to run an analysis to tell us what percentage of students have already taken a sustainability-related class, based on a provided list, which would inform how feasible the implementation of a credit requirement would be. OEA would also help us in distributing a survey to the undergraduate student body to gauge the level of interest in a sustainability credit. They would offer consulting services in formulating our survey, and they would distribute it to students via email and their My UW accounts, ensuring a representative sample of the student body. We would not be able to collect distributive data without this collaboration with OEA.
Meg Parent
Project lead
- megp2@uw.edu
- Affiliation
- Student
- Years
- 2 year(s) remaining at UW
- Affiliated groups
- Sustainable Education Initiative
Sofia Berkowitz
Team member
- scfb@uw.edu
- Affiliation
- Student
- Years
- 1 year(s) remaining at UW
- Affiliated groups
- Sustainable Education initiative
Alan Galvez
SAO Advisor for Work Tag Payment
- aagalvez@uw.edu
- Affiliation and department
- Student Activities Office
Request amount and budget
Plans for financial longevity
We will not need more funding for surveying or data collection after this initial assessment. The RSO is not dependent on any source of external funding and data analysis doesn’t require additional funding.
Initial Surveying: October 2024-March 2025 – completed March 21, 2025
- Survey created: Oct 2024
- Survey distribution: Oct 2024-March 2025
- Tabling: March 2025
RSO Creation: February-March 2025 – completed March 15, 2025
- Board creation: February 2025
- Weekly Meetings Begin: February 2025
- Registered Student Organization Official Registration: March 2025
Funding: February-April 2025 – completed April 29, 2025
- Begin CSF Mini-grant: February 2025
- Contact Fiscal Admin: March 2025
- Submit CSF Mini-grant: April 2025
OEA Survey/List: March-December 2025 - Expected completion End of Fall Quarter 2025
- Survey creation: March 2025-October 2025
- Survey Distribution/Result sharing: Fall Quarter 2025
- Class List sharing: Fall Quarter 2025
Statistical Analysis: January-March 2026 - expected completion End of winter quarter 2026
- Generate summary statistics: January-March 2026
- Run a hypothesis test: March 2026
Plans for long-term project management
Currently, our co-presidents of the Sustainability Education Initiative club (SEI), Sofia and Meg, will maintain the project with the help of the officer board until the end of the school year of 2025-2026, upon Sofia’s graduation in Spring of 2026. Meg will continue to lead the club and project the following year with the officer board until she graduates in Spring of 2027, where another member of our board will be elected. The SEI currently has students of all class standings and continues to accrue new members who are interested in leadership.
Before SEI, there was a student group with a similar goal called the Sustainability Credit Coalition. They had strong leadership and started to set the groundwork but didn’t have a continuity plan in place. Learning from this, we established an RSO and election structure, including a Recruitment Chair. All our emails are shared with the official RSO account and part of the current co-presidents' goals before they graduate is to write out a detailed timeline of everything we’ve achieved and everyone we’ve worked with, as well as training all board members ahead of time, so the transition to new leadership can be seamless.
Problem statement
OEA Project Goals:
- Understanding what students want on this campus
- Acquiring a list of classes that could fulfill the requirement
- Using this data to work with campus leadership
Goal 1: OEA will help develop questions for the students and survey a distributive set so we can best understand what students want. We will also use this to learn more about how different students see sustainability and how that might change our definition.
Goal 2: We recognize that it isn’t feasible to develop substantial new curriculum; instead, we need a list of classes that could be used to fulfill this requirement, which OEA can do, and then see how many students have actually taken one of those classes. This is integral for us to know early on in the project. If 95% of students have taken one of these courses, it is likely unnecessary for us to institute a requirement. If only 5% have, more work needs to be done before making a requirement.
Goal 3: In order to convince leadership, we need distributive, unbiased data proving that this is something that students want and it will not delay graduation times as there are a significant number of applicable classes.
Problem context
A similar project was the Diversity credit requirement, which was established in 2013. It addresses a similar issue of previously not having diversity applied in cross-disciplinary contexts, making the credit necessary. It helps students learn about worldwide inequities and those that exist in their field of study. The design of our credit would be similar, so it could easily fit into student’s schedules and help them incorporate sustainability into familiar contexts. We have reached out to key faculty during that initiative, such as Sean Wong, as well as Associate Dean of CoE Julia Parrish. Through their advice and expertise, we have recognized the need for tangible, hard data supporting our case and proving that this is something students on this campus want.
There are many ongoing campaigns on campus to promote sustainability in different forms, and our credit requirement will work in tandem with, and uplift, those initiatives, as the student body will be more involved with sustainability. The credit may encourage students to take action and contribute to a more sustainable world if there is an educational system in place to highlight that this action is implementable and realistic.
Measure the impacts
| Impact / goal | Metric(s) of success | UW stakeholders impacted |
|---|---|---|
| Understand the opinions and needs of the student body | 500-700 Survey responses | Undergraduate |
| Create a list of classes to prove feasibility to admin staff | 100 Classes on list | Admin staff |
Communication tactics and tools
We started with an initial survey to evaluate how the student body feels about the current education system, if they feel well informed about the impacts of climate change, and what they would like to see in the future in terms of environmental/sustainability education on campus. To gain responses from students from various backgrounds, our members reached out to Gen. Ed. professors, tabled on campus, and contacted other RSOs to share our survey during their meetings. We would select a time, day, and location where students would be passing by the most and reach out to non-environmental RSOs to create a non-biased database.
Through those tactics, we gained over 200 more responses from students of different majors and gathered enough data to see what the student body thinks about a mandatory Sustainability credit. We found out that about 40% of students have not taken an environmental course at UW and out of those students, 55% would be interested in a Sustainability credit requirement while 30% of students were not sure. While these statistics give us a general overview of the student body’s opinion, through a meeting with a higher faculty, we realized that the survey has non-specific questions that would inaccurately represent the student body.
Outreach communication plan
Our Head of Social Media and Coverage runs our Instagram and works with our Vice President to communicate with RSOs all over campus, many of which are not sustainably focused, to broaden our impact. The surveying from OEA will be done all over campus and so will reach a large section of students. We also partner with RSOs such as NetImpact to hear different perspectives around sustainability, as they have been trying to implement a requirement like this in Foster. We are also implementing Major Mondays, where every Monday our social media team highlights how sustainability fits into a certain major.
Student involvement
Our project doesn’t include any formal student professional development, but our board does offer leadership opportunities. As we continue to expand and redefine our club, we hope to institute a training program for passing down roles. For example, the next year's Recruitment Chair would be elected during spring quarter, and so would have that whole quarter to be trained and mentored by the current Chair. Furthermore, we work closely with certain faculty members and hope to turn some of those relationships into mentorships.