Dynamic Interpretive Signage at the UW Farm

Amount Awarded: $2,200
Project Status: Active: Planning phase

We have designed three large signs for the UW Farm site at the Center for Urban Horticulture: one for the entrance that includes a detailed map and history of the farm, one that answers a commonly asked question, "where does UW Farm food go?" and one that describes the processes in the vermicomposting facility (another CSF-enabled project for the farm).

Eat Local Food Fair

Amount Awarded: $700
Project Status: Completed

Eat Local is an outdoor food fair, featuring 5 to 10 small and minority-owned restaurants from the Greater Seattle area. To successfully promote our event throughout campus, we hired a student designer to design an aesthetic infographic that represented and emphasized the purpose of our event and used it on flyers, Instagram, and banners. Additionally, we created a pamphlet that included brief information about each of the vendors and their contact information, in hopes of producing an appealing brand image to students and attracting potential customers.

Student Athletes of UW for Sustainability (SAUWS) Union Bay Restoration Project

Amount Awarded: $500
Project Status: Completed

UW Athletics has an active sustainability program that engages with the campus and surrounding community on many levels. This includes UW student-athletes, who use their voices and outreach to promote sustainability though a variety of platforms.

Brockman Memorial Tree Tour Renovation

Amount Awarded: $925
Project Status: Completed

Here at the University of Washington, we are proud of our trees! About 480 different kinds of trees beautify the University of Washington grounds, and while 28 are species native to the Pacific Northwest, the vast majority are exotic in nature. Since before the turn of the century, forestry professors, botanists, gardeners and landscape architects have planted this wide array of trees in order to facilitate both decoration and education. This means that the U.W.

Cultivating Inclusive Conservation Practices seminar series

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

Conservation and equity are intrinsically intertwined topics that have often been treated as two separate areas of study. Science, conservation, and management not only benefit from having a diversity of stakeholder perspectives informing projects, but the effects of management and scientific policies extend more broadly than the ecosystems they impact. This seminar will highlight the importance of cross-cultural collaboration and competency in science.

Eraced Magazine

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

Eraced Magazine is a print and online media publication chronicling the ways racial trauma of the past impacts all spheres of life today. Rather than echoing the rigid confines of race as a matter of opinion, Eraced is guided by the concept of intersectionality and seeks to amplify the voices of Black, Indigenous, and people of color. The publication has a number of mediums for discussing race, including news and op-ed pieces, photoessays, poetry, prose, graphic illustrations, and podcasts.

Global Sustainability Case Competition

Amount Awarded: $610
Project Status: Completed

ReThink, GC3 and Net Impact are teaming up to bring back UW's 4th annual Global Sustainability Case Competition in an all new, virtual setting! Teams of up to four students will compete to solve a real-life business problem with an innovative and environmentally sustainable solution. Our competition is focused on being a beginner-friendly case in order to expose prospective and newly-admitted business students to the world of case competitions.

Intro to Engineering Science Kits

Amount Awarded: $997
Project Status: Completed

Our goal is to give high-school students a chance to experience the engineering process and learn about renewable energy. We want to encourage them to explore engineering and sustainability, especially as a possible major and career. Furthermore, to promote equal access and opportunity to the engineering field, we want to especially target students from lower socioeconomic areas like South King County.

Power to the Pollinator Project

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

The Power to the Pollinator Project will develop a 600 sq. ft. on-campus pollinator garden consisting of native flowering plants, evergreen shrubs, and year-round woody shelter. The diverse planting collection will ensure that native pollinators have a diverse food bank from February to October with places to overwinter and burrow. As the plants mature, long-term symbiotic relationships between invertebrates, micro-organisms, and other wildlife species will also develop.

Q Center Menstruation Station: Making menstrual wellbeing sustainable and accessible

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

In pursuit of menstrual justice, the University of Washington Q Center will purchase and distribute sustainable, eco-friendly menstrual products to 100 UW students in need. The products—reusable cotton underwear liners, reusable cotton pads, and menstrual cups—will be purchased from GladRags as part of the Q Center’s upcoming initiative called Menstruation Station. Led by Graduate Program Coordinator Joie Waxler, the Menstruation Station will provide wraparound services that center the experiences, needs, and desires of bodies that bleed.

Racial Justice and Equity in Environmental Science and Beyond

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

Amid the ongoing protests that followed the death of George Floyd, the student-led Diversity and Inclusion Group (DIG) in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences organized a department-wide conversation on race. Participating graduate students, faculty, postdoctoral researchers and department staff discussed problems and solutions within small groups and a consensus emerged that, as a precursor to becoming more anti-racist, we must educate ourselves about the history and the present day manifestation of racism within our field.

8th Annual Legacy Soiree - Black Student Union

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

This formal celebration and banquet centers excellence within the black communities at the University of Washington and in the greater Seattle area. More importantly however, the Legacy Soiree is an essential effort in creating a scholarship for underrepresented students.  

Bike Tube Upcycling

Amount Awarded: $800
Project Status: Active: Post-implementation phase

The ASUW Bike Shop is a student run, full repair bicycle resource for UW students, staff and faculty. Through its affordable drop-off services, do-it-yourself repair, and maintenance classes, the shop seeks to make biking accessible for the UW community as a sustainable alternative to other modes of transportation. The Bike Shop continuously looks to support the campus cycling community’s commitment to climate response. Every year the Bike Shop generates between 150 to 250 pounds of used tube waste, as recycling centers do not accept bike tubes.

Carbon-Labeling Initiative

Amount Awarded: $140
Project Status: Active: Planning phase

This project is beginning a carbon-labeling initiative at the University of Washington which would bring awareness to the campus community about the environmental impacts associated with the food agriculture business and allow for people to make more environmentally conscious decisions with their food consumption habits. We are doing this by displaying informative posters on campus food stores and dining halls with an estimated amount of CO2 emissions and water intake it takes to produce particular food products.

Food System Coalition Campus-Wide Dolores Documentary Screening

Amount Awarded: $962
Project Status: Completed

In-line with our mission to increase UW community awareness of local and national food systems topics and issues, we are planning a free documentary screening for spring quarter at the Samuel E. Kelly Ethnic Cultural Center Theatre. We will be showing the documentary, Dolores, which is about Dolores Huerta, a civil rights activist and the co-founder, along with Cesar Chavez, of the National Farmworkers Association (now United Farm Workers).

Growing resilience and equity: Food systems amidst the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and systemic racism

Amount Awarded: $2,000
Project Status: Active: Planning phase

This project utilizes the biannual UW Food Systems Seminar (NUTR 400/500) to support student learning and dialogue about food systems amidst the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and systemic racism, which together amplify the need for health and food equity. This seminar will showcase researchers and organizers working at the confluence of these pandemics for positive and impactful change. Sessions will highlight challenges as well as transformation, hope, and potential for resilience and equity to root across the food system.

Healthy building certification for the UW Tower – education and demonstration

Amount Awarded: $999
Project Status: Completed

The student team would like to use the UW Tower, in particular, the newly renovated UW-IT space to demonstrate how to create a healthy workplace. Students in Professor Kim’s CESI 599 course will participate in a quarter long measurement and verification of indoor air quality, light, and other comfort criteria in addition to identifying and documenting relevant strategies that promote healthy workspace. The end product is to use the narratives as support documents to certify the newly renovated UW IT space as the possible Fitwel building.

Living Art

Amount Awarded: $950
Project Status: Active: Planning phase

Working with the Office of Student Veterans, Living Art, is exploring the therapeutic benefits of artwork being turned into living art (living walls). There are many healing and therapeutic benefits from living walls, including increased productivity and relaxation and we aim to improve spaces associated with student veterans. We hope to bring visual therapeutic benefits, beauty, and overall enjoyment to students in the HUB, particularly students in the study areas.

Preserving Natya UW

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

Natya UW is the University of Washington’s premier Indian Classical Dance team that strives to showcase the beautiful art form to a wide range of audiences. As members of the Indian Classical Dance circuit, we have opportunities every year to compete against Indian Classical Dance teams from other universities around the country. At these competitions, each team showcases a dance that communicates a story and/or overall theme about humanity.

Racial Justice and Equity in Environmental Science and Beyond

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

Amid the ongoing protests that followed the death of George Floyd, the student-led Diversity and Inclusion Group (DIG) in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences organized a department-wide conversation on race. Participating graduate students, faculty, postdoctoral researchers and department staff discussed problems and solutions within small groups and a consensus emerged that, as a precursor to becoming more anti-racist, we must educate ourselves about the history and the present day manifestation of racism within our field.

Sending Gratitude Across the Globe

Student Sustainability Forum

Amount Awarded: $600
Project Status: Completed

Due to their overarching, multigenerational nature, the ongoing climate, environmental, and consequential social crises must inform decisions made in every field and profession. Although the current and impending destabilization resulting from these crises call for unified action, the global response has been disappointing at best. Even in a university famed for innovation and progress our actions have been inexcusably meager.

UW GSAH Reading Group: Dismantling the Canon

Amount Awarded: $750
Project Status: Active: Planning phase

As graduate students in the Division of Art History and future educators, researchers, and museum professionals, we believe that we must be attuned to questions of diversity and its implications on our field. The art historical canon encourages prioritization and hierarchies within scholarship and museum displays. We aim to create an inclusive and actively anti-racist art history, by seeking out, researching, and teaching the work of artists and scholars that are often left on the margins.

2019 Global Leadership Summit

Amount Awarded: $840
Project Status: Completed

Come participate in discussions and workshops designed to help you find the perfect avenue to enact responsible and sustainable change in your career. This summit allows you to follow your own interests in making the world a better place, and to listen to and engage with professionals making a positive change in our world.

A Green New Deal: Panel Discussion

Amount Awarded: $750
Project Status: Completed

Interested in what a Green New Deal would look like here in Seattle and Washington State? Join us for a panel discussion on what potential policies could be implemented at the national, state, and city level. We will discuss the details of transitioning to a clean energy economy that provides living wage jobs and protects the most vulnerable communities in our fight against climate change. Date: April 25th, 6pm - 7:30pm Location: HUB Room 250 Panelists: Lylianna Allala, Legislative Aid for U.S.

A Retreat to Build Faculty Capacity for Mindful Leadership

This initiative brings together a group of College of Built Environment (CBE) faculty to explore the relationships and synergies of three themes that inform our theory and practice—resilience and well-being; systems thinking; and biophilic design—as a potent means by which to enrich CBE faculty, pedagogy, and students in not only what our students need to know, but how their learning process reflects these interrelated concepts towards greater compassion.

Black Student Union Legacy Soriee

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

The Black Student Union Legacy Soiree is an annual celebration and banquet that centers excellence within the Black communities at the University of Washington and in the greater Seattle area. We are also putting in essential effort in continuing to fundraise for our endowment fund, providing as a scholarship for underrepresented students.

Capillaries: The Journal of Narrative Medicine

Capillaries works within the genre of narrative medicine, a movement which invites healthcare providers and patients to reflect on their experiences using writing and art and to develop appreciation for the inherent humanity in all people. We are expanding awareness of and participation in narrative medicine at UW, encouraging undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff –from all departments, not just in medicine –to share their stories with us.

Creating a Sustainable Night Market

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

Night Market is an annual event that reaches thousands of people. The Taiwanese Student Association is dedicated to making Night Market greener and greener each year. This year we are focusing on composting and the importance of reusable water bottles.

Double Dip Conference

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

Diversity in Psychology is an RSO that was created in response to the alarming lack of diversity and representation in the field of Psychology, and specifically within the Psychology department at the University of Washington. Our founding members noticed the large emphasis of the experiences of White people as the center of many class discussions as well as in media representations of mental health and mental illness.

Eat Local Seattle Food Fair

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

The Supplier Diversity Program at UW is a registered student organization that promotes the use of local, minority, women, and LGBTQ owned companies around the greater Seattle area. Eat Local Seattle Food Fair is just one of the many outreach projects that we are working on, in order to encourage the UW community to utilize these companies. We will be inviting vendors from across the community to come on to campus to sell their goods, and be further exposed to the UW community.

Habitat Snags Outreach: Increasing the Urban Forest Health on Campus

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

The University of Washington has been creating more and more snags out of fallen trees in the past year. Adding snags (standing dead trees) to the landscape adds a substantial amount of ecological benefits. Snags (dead wood) provides new life to habitat. They provide food for many wood boring insects and mammals such as ants, beetles, and woodpeckers. The cavities within this dead wood make great nesting habitat and living quarters for woodpeckers, red squirrels and many other species of birds, bats and insects.

Healing spaces heat map

The proposed method to address this question is to create a heat density map highlighting where people identify as a healing space for them on campus. I want to administer a mapping survey where students, faculty and staff are able to identify places on campus where they seek refuge during the work/school day, before and after their time spent here. This type of survey data can then be aggregated to create a specific map. I will also aim to ask questions for how people are using the space itself.

Indigenizing Urban Seattle Podcast

Indigenizing Urban Seattle is a podcast that contextualizes Indigenous environmental knowledge and resiliency from an urban Native lens. It serves as a platform to amplify urban Natives’ voices and perspectives in the environmental discourse. We focus on urban Natives currently residing in Seattle—a hub for urban Native resiliency, environmental activism, and solidarity movements.

Keraton 2019

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

Keraton is one of the largest Indonesian cultural events in the West Coast. Over the past few years, Keraton has been ISAUW’s biggest and fastest growing annual event that attracted over 8,000 people in 2017. This year, we are expecting 10,000 individuals.

Khmer New Years Show 2019

Amount Awarded: $560
Project Status: Completed

KhSA UW has joined the Sadhu for Green movement that emerged from the Khmer community in Seattle as a desire to engage in awareness and action for environmental wellness. Our current focus is on sustainability and waste-consumption, where we are aiming to reduce the amount of waste that goes into the landfills by providing alternative compostable options besides plastic items and raising awareness about how to live more sustainably by reducing use of non-biodegradable products.

Many Voices: A Storytelling Toolkit for Community-based Oral History Projects

This project will utilize low-cost and open-source technologies such as the Raspberry Pi single-board computer and near-field communication to create a modular interactive exhibit for use by oral history projects. Inspired by other community-based oral history kiosks, this project will expand on their work to create a ready-to-install software package with accompanying modular kiosk designs so that any oral history or public history organization can create an interactive exhibit that features their work with very little monetary investment.

Mapping for the Wellbeing of UW

The project is going to be dope. Being able to better understand how folks at UW use space, and especially what elements and factors within a space draw them to use a particular space can tell us a lot about the ways in which UW can strive to be more healing. Through research we know and understand how valuable nature and place are, and we don't know what is important to the people using UW's campus quite yet.

Matsuri 2019

Amount Awarded: $999
Project Status: Completed

Matsuri, which means "festival" in Japanese, is the Japanese Student Association's annual event where we showcase the diversity of Japanese culture with Japanese food, games, and performances. We have put on this event for more than 10 years, offering a place where the greater Seattle community can connect with each other through the rich culture of Japan.  Along with the many foods that we sell, we create a lot of waste in the form of plates, utensils, napkins, and water bottles, among others.

Neah Bay Telling Our Stories: Imagining Our Futures

This collaborative project is built on a longstanding partnership between UW’s Pipeline Project and Neah Bay Elementary School and has been developed to address a community-identified need. The result is an exciting project that will focuses on encouraging Neah Bay students to envision their futures. The goal will be to not only have Native students see themselves pursuing higher education, but learning, as early as fifth grade, of career paths that could ensure their being able to live and thrive in Neah Bay after graduation.

Pac-12 Sustainability Conference Student Registration Funding

Amount Awarded: $490
Project Status: Completed

Sustainability Studio is an upper-level elective offered through the College of the Environment’s Program on the Environment. Sustainability Studio is an experiential learning course where students work in groups of 3-5 on different projects with clients from the UW and Seattle community to improve sustainability around the topic of the quarter. The topic of Sustainability Studio changes every quarter to allow for dynamic learning that addresses sustainability across a broad spectrum of issues.

Rebound: The Bounce Back Used Notebooks Deserve

Amount Awarded: $405
Project Status: Active: Planning phase

Each quarter students buy brand new notebooks and throughout each lecture slowly fill the pages with diagrams and key points. However, as dead week rolls around many find they have excess blank pages leftover. A large portion of students hold on to these notebooks, never to look back at their notes, while others recycle or even put the paper into the trash. Our campus Rotaract Club is proposing an innovative alternative, to collect these notebooks at the end of each quarter to be disassembled and rebound into new notebooks.

RepairCycle

The RepairCycle is a mobile, on-the-spot garment mending service and experience that brings the UW (and Seattle) community together around the universal aspect of clothing—offering a functional service while creating connection and dialogue through a shared activity. By empowering creative and easy-to-learn mending skills, we are working to transform our local community’s relationship with clothing. Ultimately, we believe that garment repair is not just a viable option, but should a delightfully designed experience.

Resilience and Compassion @ Odegaard Pop-Up Events

The “Resilience and Compassion @ Odegaard Pop-Up Events” will engage students in forming community around compassion and resilience, diversity, equity and inclusion, and holistic student wellness. The proposed event series will have a different focus each quarter that ties directly to the theme of resilience, compassion and sustainability:

Resilience and Urban Sustainability in Public Writing Partnerships

UW-Seattle’s Expository Writing Program (EWP) helps prepare over 5000 students each year with critical literacy, research, writing, and communication capacities that are essential for successful participation across the academy and in public life. Our program seeks to help students engage in writing as a means of social action; develop ethical communication practices; and understand and be responsible for the consequences of language use for diverse communities. Building on our program’s longstanding history of engaging undergraduate students in public and community-based writing courses, w

Steam Condensate Reclamation - Feasibility Study

Amount Awarded: $400
Project Status: Completed

All campus electricity, heating, cooling, air, and IT cables are supplied by the 8.5-mile network of utility tunnels underneath the campus. Within the tunnels, an underdrain system collects the leaking steam condensate and infiltrating groundwater and discharges it into the sewer main, Lake Union, or in vegetated areas on the Burke Gillman trail. This "nuisance" water represents a substantial water resource that could possibly be reclaimed as non-potable water. Possible uses for this water would be campus irrigation, dust control, or even an auxiliary supply to Drumheller Fountain.

Taiko Kai Spring Concert

Amount Awarded: $500
Project Status: Completed

Taiko Kai's third annual Spring Concert will provide a space to celebrate Japanese culture and the achievements of the club members throughout the year. The show will be two hours in duration, featuring drumming, dancing, bamboo flute, and guest performances from local groups! Hanwoollim from UW, Hidaka Taiko from Seattle University, and Dekoboko Taiko from the Seattle area will accompany Taiko Kai on-stage to showcase each group's unique energy. Taiko Kai will also be using this concert to spread awareness of sustainable practices.

TEDxUofW

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

TEDxUofW is a 100% student run RSO that hosts a yearly "TEDxUofW Conference" where speakers from the UW and Seattle community come to share their stories and experiences to an audience. Speakers range from UW students, to professors, CEOs, entrepreneurs, and innovative thinkers of the Seattle Community. In addition to speaking, we also have experience parlors, discussions, and a full day experience for all attendees.

Women in Applied Mathematics Mentorship Program (WAMM)

WAMM is a student-run directed reading program that pairs undergraduate women interested in a mathematics-related field with Ph.D. students from the Applied Mathematics Department at the University of Washington. The pairs meet every week over the course of a quarter to work through a project decided upon during the first meeting based on the mentee's interest. Projects typically involve a combination of reading texts or papers to learn new mathematical ideas, analytical work done by hand with pencil and paper, and numerical experimentation using a relevant programming language.

A Feast for the Senses: A Community Pop-Up Cafe

Amount Awarded: $700
Project Status: Completed

A Feast for the Senses is a community pop-up café focusing on consumption and the power of consumer choice, specifically through the lens of food systems, both industrial and regenerative.

Biological Control of Insects

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

Grounds Management is releasing beneficial insects throughout campus. This is a step we are adding to our Integrated Pest Management strategy that could help us reduce non organic methods. This will help grounds management increase our sustainability and improve the campus aesthetically.

Climate Panel Event

Amount Awarded: $150
Project Status: Completed

Green Evans, the environmental policy RSO at the Evans School of Public Policy, hosted a panel event on February 13, 2018, to spark discussion at UW and the surrounding community about the various climate policy proposals currently being considered for Washington State. The CSF grant covered travel expenses for one of the panelists.

Engage with Renewable Energy: Interactive Art Exhibition & Reusables Workshop

Amount Awarded: $644
Project Status: Completed

Global Leadership Forum

Amount Awarded: $420
Project Status: Completed

The inaugural Global Leadership Summit took place on April 4th, and provided a space for approximately 170 business professionals, students, and community members to discuss and delve into this question of how we as a community can engage with real-world decisions and discussions that are sustainable, ethical, and socially responsible. These issues, looked at in a global context of health, business, technology, and environmental public policy, are intersectional in nature.

HUB Bin Expansion Project

Amount Awarded: $952
Project Status: Completed

The Hub bin installation is a useful tool to help educate students, staff, faculty, and visitors about recycling and composting. Currently the installation has three bins that are synced up to a set of screens that tell users how their proper waste disposal affects the environment. Unfortunately, the current bins are too small, difficult to service, have a limited capacity, are visually unappealing, and cannot handle the amount of foot traffic and waste. By noon, the bins are completely overflowing, deterring people from using them.

Implementing Sustainability: Bamboo toothbrushes for UW Dentistry

Amount Awarded: $900
Project Status: Completed

Every year in the United States, 50 million pounds of plastic toothbrushes are sent to landfills. This project aims to change that by convincing the American public to switch to compostable bamboo toothbrushes. To do this, I created a pilot program for the University of Washington School of Dentistry faculty and students to receive informed feedback.

Keraton

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

Keraton is ISAUW's most iconic event. Currently, Keraton is the largest Indonesian festival in the West coast, and the second largest in the United States. Held annually at the UW since 2011, Keraton has fascinated and mesmerized students and visitors alike through unique activities including a range of traditional dance performances, games, and food prepared by local and international vendors coming from different regions of Indonesia. We are committed to leave an indelible impression and has attracted up to 8000 multinational visitors from all over the country.

Matsuri 2018

Amount Awarded: $999
Project Status: Completed

UW Matsuri has been the Japanese Student Association’s main annual event for over 10 years. Matsuri, meaning festival in Japanese, is an event where we display the rich culture of Japan with delicious Japanese food, festive and thematic Japanese games, and many exciting and traditional performances. Along with the many foods that we sell, we create a lot of waste in the form of plates, utensils, napkins, and water bottles, among others.

ReThink UW's Fourth Annual Resilience Summit

Amount Awarded: $375
Project Status: Completed

Row for Climate

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

Salvage Wood Project Advertising Campaign

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

One of our most successful projects, the salvage wood program, is starting an advertising campaign. This project turns wood from fallen trees into usable products such as benches, tables and nametags. Keeping our trees on campus substantially reduces our carbon footprint. Grinding up and transporting these trees to cedar grove requires the use of fossil fuels and produces carbon emissions. Currently, there is more salvage wood than there is demand for its usable products. At the current rate we will not have adequate room to store all of the downed wood for future projects.

TSA Night Market 2018

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

The UW Night Market is one of the biggest annual on-campus event, held by the Taiwanese Student Association (TSA). This year, UWNM brings up to 30 vendors to Red Square to promote Taiwanese culture. There are variety of exotic foods as well as running games and activities for the audience to participate in. On average, we have about 7000+ people attending UWNM and its popularity grows each year. In previous years, the size of the event has caused problems in waste management. UW has strict rules regarding waste disposal and sorting waste into its correct receptacle.

WashPIRG 100% Renewable Energy Plant Potting Event

Amount Awarded: $223
Project Status: Completed

Youth Engineering Green Solutions to Stormwater Runoff and Pollution Prevention

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

2017 TSA Night Market Recycling Program

Amount Awarded: $999
Project Status: Completed

The UW Night Market has been an event held in Red Square every year since 2001. It is one of the Taiwanese Student Association’s signature events and easily the largest in scale in terms of people. The event recreates traditional night markets in Taiwan and is centered around food. Last year, we had 24 total vendors. Every year, this event creates large amounts of waste that isn’t properly disposed of by guests; this year, we plan to create a recycling plan that alleviates this issue.

Apiary for the UW Farm

Amount Awarded: $337
Project Status: Completed

The teaching apiary at the UW Farm contains 10-12 hives of honey bees and is used by students to learn basic beekeeping skills and also to perform experiments in bee biology. The bee course has been taught Summer A+B terms since 2011. Support for the program derives from student fees, covering course-specific activities, and an account funded by donations and fund raising, which covers maintenance of the hives and equipment acquisition. Researchers from departments as varied as Chemistry and Psychology have used the hives as education and research subjects in past years.

Earth Day Band: Improvisational Music Project (IMP)

Amount Awarded: $500
Project Status: Completed

We believe that art is essential to the activism surrounding sustainability movements and often functions as a catalyst for engagement. In our search for a band, we focused our efforts on finding local UW student ensembles. Supporting the sustainability of the arts on the UW campus was an important value that helped aided our selection. We also considered that finding the right group could could help establish a precedent for collaboration for future events like the SustainableUW Festival.

Greek Community Energy Challenge

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Inactive

The Green Greek Representative Energy Challenge is a challenge designed to make the Greek community more energy efficient, which will make it more desirable to people who choose housing based on sustainability. Through this challenge, we seek to educate men and women in the Greek community about making sustainable choices that will save them and their chapters money while also helping improve the environment.

Increasing drought tolerance of campus lawns with endophytes

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

The University of Washington has over 161 acres of turf grass.  Grounds maintenance, at the University applies a custom, slow release chemical fertilizer (F-6 Wil-Grow Wil-Cote Custom-CFM 25-0-5) for all turf applications. Chemical fertilizers can be detrimental to the environment and to the long term health of soils. With global warming at the forefront of scientific research, it is imperative that alternative, environmentally friendly lawn care systems are implemented. Revising the fertilizer plan for the lawns is a potentially important step for grounds management to undertake.

Keraton Going Green

Amount Awarded: $999
Project Status: Completed

Not only did Keraton attracted 8000 people last year but also had 13 vendors selling food. As a result, there is a substantial amount of waste produced. This year, Keraton is aiming to attract 10000 people. Surely, there will be more waste produced than last year. Therefore ISAUW will implement the ‘Keraton Going Green’ effort, which will ensure the reduction of waste production by vendors as well as the overseeing of waste sorting in the recycling and compost bins locations.

Mobile Maintenance Trailer for the ASUW Bike Shop

Amount Awarded: $980
Project Status: Completed

Can't make it in to the bike shop? Now, the bike shop can make it to you. The Mobile Maintenance Trailer allows the student mechanics at the ASUW Bike Shop to traverse this majestic campus with all the tools necessary to provide safety-check and quick tune-up services for any UW cyclists they encounter, free of charge. Everything a rusty bicycle could ever want, including an assortment of professional shop tools and an array of greases, degreasers, and lubricants, will be kept conveniently in a Surly long-bed trailer.

Replacing Chemical Fertilizers with Compost, Compost Tea, and Biosolids

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

This project attempts to assess the feasibility of the University of Washington switching to an organic fertilizing system. The efficacy of biosolids, compost, and compost tea will be compared to the 8,000 pounds of chemical fertilizer that are annually applied to the campus lawns. 

ReThink Resilience Summit 2017

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

Surviving Catastrophe: Public Health and Solidarity in an Era of Climate Change

Amount Awarded: $550
Project Status: Completed

Radical Public Health UW is hosting an evening of discussion and consciousness-raising about the root causes and myriad dangers of the global climate change crisis. In the current political context, local and global, it is more important than ever before to have honest, unapologetic discussions about this growing emergency.

2016 UW Night Market

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

Since 2001, the Taiwanese Student Association (TSA) has brought this dynamic, cultural event to the University of Washington campus. Given its success, the UW Night Market has quickly become an annual Seattle tradition. Our goal is to bring people together in celebrating and appreciating Taiwanese culture. The event includes many vendors selling various Taiwanese foods, on-stage performances, as well as cultural activities. However, we don't want it to be just a cultural event, we also hope to increase community awareness of how to maintain a sustainable enviroment.

Earth Day 2016 Celebration

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

The Earth day celebration is a popular annual gathering at the University of Washington. This year marks the 45th anniversary of the event. On April 22nd, 2015 the event was put on by UW’s student run Earth Club and assisted by the UW sustainability staff. The goal of the organizers is to bring as many people together as they can to talk about our planet and sustainability. This year the celebration was located in Red Square in the center of campus.

Environmental Display for Paccar Hall

Amount Awarded: $890
Project Status: Completed

While built environments provide people and society with a lot of benefits, they also have significant influence on our environment. According to EPA, people in the United States spend more than 90% of their time in the built environments. However, many of them feel less engaged with buildings since they have limited access to the information and knowledge about the buildings such as how the air is heated within the buildings? Many studies show that this lack of engagement will influence how comfortable occupants feel and how much environmental awareness they have within buildings.

Fossil Fuel Divestment Pacific Northwest Network Spring 2016 Convergence

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

72 hours. 50 people. 12 schools. One World Changed!

Students from the Confronting Climate Change RSO are doing the exciting work of planning a student divestment convergence this spring 2016. Students from colleges across the northwest region will be coming together to strengthen the current fossil fuel divestment movement of the region.

Next System Teach-In

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

The UW Center for Communication & Civic Engagement’s Rethinking Prosperity project organized the Next System Teach-In in partnership with the UW Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies. Rethinking Prosperity is an initiative that seeks to identify and communicate economic models that work for more people, within planetary boundaries. It emerged from a seminar of undergraduate seniors in Communication. The Teach-In took place on April 25th, 2016 at Kane Hall.

Planting and Installing Pollinator Habitats at the University of Washington Farm at the Center for Urban Horticulture

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

This project will be to design and plant a hedgerow along the southern boundary of the UW-CUH Farm; it will be composed of woody perennial plant species that will act primarily as pollinator habitat, providing forage, shelter, and most importantly, overwintering habitat for insects. By installing suitable habitat for local pollinating insects, this project will both enhance the biodiversity of the surrounding Union Bay Natural Area and benefit student food production at the UW Farm by potentially increasing the yield of vegetables grown and the genetic diversity (stress-tolerance) of the cr

Tribal Water Security Colloquium: Rethinking Our Relationship With Water

Amount Awarded: $960
Project Status: Completed

The Tribal Water Security Colloquium (TWSC) was hosted by the Water is Life: water, health and “ecosystem services” class taught by Dr. Clarita Lefthand-Begay in the Department of American Indian Studies. Undergraduate students enrolled in this class collaborated by picking, inviting and hosting leaders to speak about water. In the TWSC we focused our attention on creating a space where we could learn directly from influential tribal leaders whose communities are at the forefront of climate change and environmental challenges.

Earth Day 2015 Celebration

Amount Awarded: $1,000
Project Status: Completed

The Earth day celebration is a popular annual gathering at the University of Washington. This year marks the 45th anniversary of the event. On April 22nd, 2015 the event was put on by UW’s student run Earth Club and assisted by the UW sustainability staff. The goal of the organizers is to bring as many people together as they can to talk about our planet and sustainability. This year the celebration was located in Red Square in the center of campus.

Prairie Rain Garden

Amount Awarded: $398
Project Status: Completed

The Prairie Rain Garden is a student run project located near the botanic gardens on the north-east corner of campus. The students involved are trying to improve the ecosystem of a small plot of land by removing invasive species, improving the topography and planting a healthy native plant garden. The garden’s location is just uphill of a trail which is frequently flooded during the rainy season and becomes extremely muddy and impassable. The Prairie Garden is designed to capture some of the rainfall, filter the water and drain it to prevent runoff flowing onto the path.  

Understanding Pro-Environmental Behavior

Amount Awarded: $700
Project Status: Completed

Doctoral Canidate Julie Kriegh is local architect and a graduate from the University of Washington. She works towards environmental health and sustainability across the Northwest. Her specialty is in the design of sustainable buildings that fit LEED certifications (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.) She has organized a panel which included multiple other experts in their fields. The speakers come from a broad range of academia and origins.  Dr. Manzo is an associate professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington.

UW Night Market

Amount Awarded: $400
Project Status: Completed

The UW night market is an annual event, which is put on by the Taiwanese Student Association (TSA). The night market brings up to 20 vendors to red square to promote Taiwanese culture. Vendors sell a wide variety of cultural foods as well as running games and activities for market goers to participate in. There are also free musical performances put on by the TSA.