Green Mountain Center for Sustainability Notes for September 2024

Submitted by Laird Christensen and Eleanor Tison, Co-Directors

A new academic year means that Work-Study students from the Green Mountain Center for Sustainability are already hard at work! The Crew placed compost buckets in every suite of the Village residence halls to prepare for another year of collecting kitchen scraps for our campus compost system. New and returning student residents were also greeted with kitchenware, hiking gear, and clothing hangers collected during the summer Green Move-out to help them return to campus. We love integrating new students into Sustainability Center activities as soon as possible to make it a welcoming and safe space to begin their college journey! Meanwhile, online, our Advisory Council created a new private Facebook group to serve not only alumni, but also former staff, friends, and neighbors of the college. Our intention is not to compete with other GMC Facebook pages (of which there are quite a few), but to provide a central clearinghouse for information and to help create connections between members. You can join chats focused on different years when you were there, talk with others from your academic major, and even find a place for artisans to share their work. Members can also create their own focused chats and invite friends from their time in Poultney.

We have chosen to keep this page private to avoid folks with no connection to GMC who might try to come on and try to sell you things; the steps we take to protect the privacy of this group will hopefully deter the bots and hawkers that have been showing up on other pages. So if you decide you would like to be a part of this Private Facebook Group, be prepared to provide a few details as you answer a membership question about your connection to the college. (You’d be surprised how many requests we get that say nothing more than “I’m an alum,” or “My daughter attended,” and we’ve already had to block a few folks who snuck in that way.) You can ask to join the group by going to the Green Mountain College Community Private Group at the following address: https://www.facebook.com/groups/948020510177911 We’re also in the early stages of creating a Mentoring Network to provide career guidance to current students and recent graduates. 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].