Green Mountain Center for Sustainability Notes for November 2023
Submitted by Laird Christensen and Eleanor Tison, Co-Directors
On October 7th the staff at the Sustainability Center partnered with Slow Foods Prescott to host the annual Fall Harvest Festival, which drew 200 community members to campus. Participants shared information about community composting, rainwater harvesting, and the Yavapai-Apache Garden of Life. People lined up to try out our new campus apple cider press, accompanied by the sounds of live music, while students from Eleanor Tison’s Transforming Community Food Systems course prepared an autumn meal from locally sourced ingredients.
Events like this provide a particularly joyful opportunity to help build connections between Prescott College and our neighbors, which is an essential part of creating resilient communities.
If you’d like to help support our work, we would be most grateful for any assistance you can offer. We’ve included a button for gifts on the Green Mountain Center website. You can even specify what you’d like your contribution to go toward on the form.
Meanwhile online, we love sharing news from our GMC alumni, and we hope that you will reach out and let us know about where the path from Poultney has led you. It’s as easy as sending a message to [email protected].
Alumni News
Patrick McKamy (BS 2006, Adventure Education, and BA 2006, History) is Director of Advising and Retention for the School of Education at Indiana University Bloomington. He spent eleven years in Student Activities at Misericordia University, where he coordinated the institution’s outdoor program, including pioneering an Outdoor Leader program, building a challenge course, and developing summer outdoor orientation programs. Since leaving Green Mountain, he has earned a pair of masters degrees in Education and Organizational Management, and is currently pursuing an Ed.D in Higher Education and Student Affairs at Indiana University.
Amy Barra (BA 2009, Environmental Studies and Education) started a new job as a Public Affairs Specialist with NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in early 2023. In this role she coordinates media activities for rocket launches and other missions, including media events for a recent cargo resupply to the International Space Station, and a media day for the RockOn student sounding rocket launch. Amy is not entirely sure how she ended up at NASA, but she’s enjoying this new role and is looking forward to supporting eclipse missions in 2023 and 2024 (plan your eclipse viewing locations for April 8, 2024!).
Lori Curtis (MS 2010, Environmental Studies) spent ten years as Science & Education Director for the Whitefish Lake Institute in northwest Montana, while also teaching in the MSES and MRSC programs at Green Mountain College. She served for seven years as Supervisor of the Flathead Conservation District Board and was appointed by the Governor of Montana to Chair of the Upper Columbia Conservation Commission. She continues to teach graduate courses and serves as Capstone Coordinator at Prescott College.