Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) Conference 2019
Approved: 8/22/19
Funding Amount: $8,944
Expected to draw approximately 2,000 participants, the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s (AASHE’s) annual conference is the largest stage in North America to exchange effective models, policies, research, collaborations and transformative actions that advance sustainability in higher education and surrounding communities. Attending AASHE will allow for the UK student representatives to find solutions and get ideas for how to best implement sustainability on campus. Workshops at the conference cover all three pillars, often combining them.
Positive Impact Points
Approved: 8/22/19
Funding Amount: $10,000
The premise of the program is simple: reward students for engaging in positive actions and behaviors with incentives that are meaningful and aligned with strategic goals (how many t-shirts, pop sockets, and water bottles do we really need?). Imagine If every time students rode the bus, biked, donated time or recycled, they were rewarded with a ‘currency of good,’ that they could redeem for great deals on healthy food, fitness classes and responsibly made gear OR use to unlock matching scholarship grants when they commit what they earn to pay school expenses. Engagement in purpose, sustainability, health and financial wellness correlates with higher retention, productivity, lifetime value and success; delivering quantifiable ROI to subscribing institutions in higher education, as well as business.
North American Association for Environmental Education Conference
Approved: 9/10/19
Funding Amount: $8,944
The North American Association for Environmental Education’s vision is a sustainable future for all where environmental and social responsibility drive individual and institutional choices. Their mission is to bring the brightest minds together to accelerate environmental literacy and civic engagement through the power of education. Participation in the conference would help our students to understand what this means and be part of the process.
Urban and Environmental Design Travel Week
Approved: 9/24/19
Funding Amount: $2,400
During this 4 day trip to Los Angeles, students in the College of Design will study the River Masterplan, meet with key teams of designers working on the LA River, as well as to tour the river itself and meet with community leaders and groups. The nature of this visit is to explore potential opportunities for growth and development on many scales such as site planning, material analysis, adaptive reuse and ecological restoration of brownfield sites. This is an an ambitious interdisciplinary collaboration bringing together Masters students in Architecture, Interiors, Urban & Environmental Design as well as fourth-year Landscape Architecture students from the College of Agriculture.
Local Food Summit
Approved: 10/8/19
Funding Amount: $1,125
The second annual Kentucky Local Food Systems Summit will bring food system professionals, extension agents, and students together to network and learn from each other to ultimately improve the sustainability of our local food system. The day of the summit will involve a series of concurrent sessions led by various professionals and researchers that attendees can choose from and designated time for networking. The overarching goals of the summit is to facilitate: (1) valuable connections with other food system leaders and practitioners, (2) innovative tools to approach local food system development (3) an update on the latest research, and (4) spur new collaborations and initiatives.
Stormwater Program Logo Competition
Approved: 10/8/19
Funding Amount: $1,000
This project will help promote environmental stewardship through branding and increased awareness of UK's MS4 stormwater program and pet waste campaign. Reaching a larger audience, however, requires we focus our message and develop our brand as it pertains to stormwater. One important step in this process redesigning UK’s stormwater logo. Our past successes involving students in logo design competitions have demonstrated that such competitions yield creative and insightful designs while educating entrants and non-entrants alike.
Farmbot.Wildcats
Approved: 10/22/19
Funding Amount: $637
Farmbot.Wildcats is a student organization at the University of Kentucky. The goal of the organization is to automate forms of home gardening systems so that consumers always have access to nutritional food and we do that with through Farmbot. Farmbot is an automatic gardener; it can grow certain crops from seed to harvest without any human intervention.
Universities Fighting World Hunger Conference
Approved: 10/22/19
Funding Amount: $10,000
The Universities Fighting World Hunger (UFWH) Summit will be a 2-day event on from March 19-20, 2020. This year, the theme for the Summit is “Seeing a World Without Hunger.” The Summit’s overarching goal is to bring awareness to hunger and the initiatives that individuals around the globe are involved in, in an effort to inspire others to duplicate these projects in their own communities. UK students will act as coordinators and volunteers in order to assist in the execution of the Summit. Additionally, these students will have the opportunity to network with other advocates at mealtimes. Students attendees will have the opportunities to attend sessions.
UK Solar Car
Approved: 11/5/19
Funding Amount: $13,000
Solar Car is a student organization that is seeking to expand their solar-reliant technology in three parts. First, they will build a new solar panel array for our next car, Gato del Sol VII. Gato del Sol VII is to be their most efficient solar vehicle to date. The second project is to build a solar array on top of our trailer, allowing us to race and operate much more environmentally friendly versus the gasoline generator they currently use. Finally, they would like to build a mobile charger stand for outreach events, to highlight their ability to create green energy solutions as a student-led team, and to give an easy-to-understand demonstration of solar energy.
Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference
Approved: 11/19/19
Funding Amount: $11,850
Now in its tenth year, this student-organized effort has grown into a highly regarded conference drawing international participation from distinguished scholars, while also providing a much-needed space for engagement by community-based practitioners and young graduate and undergraduate scholars. The DOPE conference features internationally recognized speakers in the field of political ecology, dynamic conference sessions on individual’s sustainability research, engaging environmental field trips, and new for this year, in-depth and interactive methods workshops.
UFI TreeCATS
Approved: 12/10/19
Funding Amount: $14,110
The Urban Forest Initiative (UFI) works to raise awareness of the ecological, social, and economic benefits provided by the urban tree canopy on University of Kentucky campus and the greater Central Kentucky region since 2014. The TreeCATs (Collegiate Arborist Team) workshops have provided knowledge and training for University of Kentucky students on the benefits of urban forests and the challenges and strategies associated with their stewardship for the past three years. This year, our goal is to incorporate the traditional workshop introduction to urban forestry that provides a holistic understanding of the function and management of urban forests, while directing additional focus on invasive species, which negatively affect urban forest health and function.
SSC Webhost
Approved: 12/10/19
Funding Amount: $2,754
This project will help improve the function of the SSC application process. Currently, there are issues with the webform that need to be addressed in order to make the process smoother for those applying for funding. Additionally, the webform needs regular maintenance, especially has the online application process is refined overtime.
Campus Kitchens Garden Internship
Approved: 2/3/20
Funding Amount: $4,750
The Campus Kitchen at the University of Kentucky (CKUK) is an on-campus student service organization that provides a sustainable approach to addressing hunger, by simultaneously reducing food waste and providing healthy meals to those struggling with food insecurity, both on campus and in the greater Lexington community. With the funding from this grant, we will support two committed interns with agricultural experience, one that will work primarily with our on-campus garden at the Gaines University of Kentucky Center, and one that will focus on our garden at Arbor Youth Services. These interns will work on projects to strengthen CKUK’s garden program and optimize the number of food- insecure students and community members that we can serve.
UK Sustainability Stories Magazine
Approved: 2/3/20
Funding Amount: $2,200
“UK Sustainable Stories” is a student publication of the SSC highlighting the stories behind some of UK’s recent sustainability initiatives. The magazine could be used as an outreach tool for the SSC, a visualization of the Sustainability Strategic Plan, a method of increasing student engagement in sustainability, and to better facilitate conversation across sustainability disciplines. Sustainability at UK is fragmented across multiple departments, organizations, and individuals, and our hope is that this document helps to bridge these gaps by highlighting specific stories across campus in a single document.
Design Society: Help Us Build a Ramp
Approved: 2/17/20
Funding Amount: $6,784
For a community project, the Design Society is working with the Parachute Factory. The project is to build a handicap access ramp and entrance which includes a deck, stairs, and new door. With help from the Student Sustainability Council, the funding will directly benefit the Lexington community. It has been disheartening for the Parachute Factory to not be able to invite community members who are wheelchair-bound, to their events and art exhibitions. The Design Society is offering free design work and labor to make art accessible for ALL.
UFI Tree Week
Approved: 2/17/20
Funding Amount: $9,551
Tree Week was created in 2018 to celebrate Lexington’s trees and all the ways in which trees positively affect our lives. During the inaugural Tree Week there were over 60 registered activities, and although we didn’t track attendance, we do know that these activities engaged hundreds of attendees from the UK campus and greater Lexington communities. Since its inception, UFI has provided significant support for Tree Week in the form of infrastructure and personnel, including web site development and maintenance, solicitation and registration of event hosts, development of an interactive event map, recruitment of volunteers, soliciting attendees, and tracking events and engagement. This proposal requests funds to support Tree Week 2020.
Quantifying Microplastics
Approved: 2/17/20
Funding Amount: $631
For his senior research project, a student will quantify and compare microplastic accumulation on the University of Kentucky campus. This research will inform individuals on campus of an environmental state that is otherwise imperceptible. Soils everywhere are subject to the accumulation of microplastics but perhaps none more than locations where plastic parent material is over-represented. Knowing how microplastic debris behaves in smaller surrogate studies such as this one will help direct future large scale efforts.
Sustainability Internship Program 2020-2021
Approved: 3/9/20
Funding Amount: $17,000
These internship positions provide unique and meaningful experiences for the students involved and valuable support for the units that are mentoring. The Office of Sustainability coordinates the program and the interns are paired with a mentor from either an operational unit (ex: UK Recycling) or one of the Tracy Farmer Institute for Sustainability and the Environment (TFISE) Working Groups. In these roles all student interns, past and present, have promoted the three pillars of sustainability in a range of areas on campus including: campus gardens, transportation, waste reduction, storm water management, energy conservation, education and outreach, urban forests, and the built environment.
Pictured: Interns and graduate assistants from the 2020-2021 Sustainability Internship Program.
Sustainability Graduate Assistantship
Approved: 3/9/20
Funding Amount: $30,855
The SSC’s mission is to cultivate and promote a culture of sustainability here at UK. Thus, the purpose of a graduate assistantship is to increase the overall efficacy and capacity of the SSC and Office of Sustainability in order to better cultivate the culture of sustainability. Additionally, as the SSC has grown in members and in funding capacity, there is a renewed need for a focused professional that is dedicated to supporting SSC operations.
Appalachian Studies Conference
Approved: 3/9/20
Funding Amount: $2,533
The Graduate Appalachian Research Community (GARC) is a registered student organization, made up of undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Kentucky. Their mission is to promote interdisciplinary research about Appalachia and its peoples as well as to foster a supportive community in which students from across the university can collaborate, present research, discuss obstacles and successes, and more. The Graduate Appalachian Research Community (GARC) applied for SSC funding to help host the Forty-Third Annual Appalachian Studies Conference.
Student Sustainability Council 2020 Fall Retreat
Approved: 4/27/20
Funding Amount: $1,849
The SSC fall retreat serves as an opportunity for new and existing councilmembers alike to develop their relationships with each other and to learn more about how to be an effective member of the SSC in a less formal setting than meetings that are held during the year. New members in particular will benefit from the information, discussions, and collaboration that are central to the retreat. This retreat is critical because it promotes cohesiveness and communication among Council members that will translate to synergy in meetings, committees, and in general Council operation.
