Green Mountain Center for Sustainability Notes for June 2024
Submitted by Laird Christensen and Eleanor Tison, Co-Directors
It was wonderful to see so many of our graduating Prescott College students at the Commencement ceremony in May! Hearing from our graduates about their academic and personal journeys, as well as from the faculty members who are sending them out into the world, was deeply inspiring. It became very clear that these graduates have indeed been well prepared to make a difference, wherever they may go.It was also good to gather with faculty colleagues, some of whom spend much of the year far away from Prescott, whether teaching at our Field Stations or in online programs. We gathered for a Faculty Retreat with our new Academic Dean, Dr. Pavel Cenkl (who some of you may recall from his time at Green Mountain College twenty years ago). The picture below is from a gathering for current and former faculty in Environmental Studies and Sustainability. You’ll probably see some familiar faces from GMC here, including Eleanor Tison, Mark Dailey, Laird Christensen, and Dianna Gielstra.
Among the good work initiated by students who graduated this year were several projects funded in part by the Sustainability Fund, which is overseen by the Green Mountain Center for Sustainability at Prescott College. The funding comes from student fees, similar to the Student Campus Greening Fund at Green Mountain College, although we have also recently begun to fund sustainability projects proposed by online students in their own communities as well.
- Anh Klink turned an unused open area outside the Cholla residential housing into a community garden on the Prescott College campus. Funding was awarded for installing a fence and building raised garden beds, which are now being planted and cared for by students over the summer.
- Kai Daniel is organizing a month-long training in mapmaking and the basics of open-source GIS software for Maasai volunteers at the Dopoi Center, a Prescott College field station in Kenya. Trainees will be connected to the Indigenous Mapping Network, a worldwide group dedicated to developing mapping capacity among indigenous communities. Funding was awarded for basic laptops, a drone, and a GIS textbook to be kept at the Dopoi Center.
- Fern Sarquiz constructed a giant paper-mache vulva cave on the Yoga Circle from repurposed material such as brown paper grocery bags, soda cans, old newspaper, and reused chicken wire. The project demonstrated making art using up-cycled materials and inspired viewers to consider the relationship between their bodies and the outer world from a different perspective. Funding was awarded for additional craft supplies.
Efforts such as these are part of the mission of the Green Mountain Center for Sustainability at Prescott College, which was created to help share the lessons and sustainability practices that made GMC so influential. If you’d like to help support our work, we appreciate any assistance you can offer. We’ve included a button for gifts on the Green Mountain Center website. You can specify what you’d like your contribution to go toward when filling out the form.
And don’t forget: we love sharing news from our GMC alumni, so we hope you will reach out and let us know where the path from Poultney has led you. It’s as easy as sending a message to [email protected].