Prescott College > Local & Global Centers > Green Mountain Center For Sustainability

Green Mountain Center For Sustainability

Learn how to live sustainably at the Green Mountain Center for Sustainability at Prescott College. We promote solutions-based learning from personal to global scales, building learning communities and supporting innovative student projects. Contact us today.

Overview

The Green Mountain Center for Sustainability at Prescott College serves students, alumni, staff, neighbors, and an online audience by promoting solutions-based learning about how to live more sustainably, from the personal to the global scale. The Center integrates Green Mountain College’s award-winning approach to sustainability education with Prescott College’s rich history of leadership in environmental studies and social justice. By building learning communities through events and programs, facilitating connections among stakeholders, and sharing resources, the center cultivates the skills and knowledge needed to create a more just and sustainable society.

One of our most important contributions, in conjunction with the Prescott College Sustainability Council, is to help fund innovative student projects that foster more environmentally, socially, or economically sustainable practices. Funding requests can be submitted via the Sustainability Funds Grant Proposal form.

If you would like to help support the work of the Green Mountain Center, click the button below to donate. Simply specify that you’d like your gift to go to the Green Mountain Center under Gift Restrictions. Thanks so much!

FROM THE DIRECTORS

March 2024 Update
By Laird Christensen and Eleanor Tison, Co-Directors

Hosting the annual Seed Mania event [see photo above] at Prescott College is one the most powerful ways to engage with the local community, as we saw this past weekend when over 370 friends and neighbors visited campus to prepare for spring gardening. Co-sponsored by Slow Food Prescott, the Prescott Farmers Market, and the Green Mountain Center for Sustainability, Seed Mania 2024 featured tables from eighteen organizations, sharing books on gardening, bags of mushrooms, a scion exchange, and seeds of all varieties, shapes, and colors. Local food experts taught participants about seed starting, water-efficient gardening, tree planting and care, mushroom cultivation, and pruning. A “Kids Activity Zone” featured seed harvesting from sunflowers, compost critter identification, and a “chicken play-pen” outside the adjacent garden. The afternoon of activities culminated in a community meal of “three sisters” chili with cornbread, kale slaw, seed cookies, tea, and coffee.

While enjoying the communal meal, we were honored to have alumnus Angel Martinez of the Yavapai-Apache Tribe provide an invocation over the meal and the day’s festivities. Angel spoke about the “seeds” planted inside us by our ancestors and asked that we consider how we nourish the roots that connect us to our communities, as they will have lasting intergenerational impacts. Another alumnus, Shanti Rade, gave the keynote address. Her internship at a local
farm in the 1990s led her to dedicate her life to growing food and, eventually, flowers. She and her husband Cory were at the first farmers markets in Flagstaff and Prescott, and after 25 years, their Whipstone Farm is now one of the region’s most established and popular vendors. “It’s definitely not easy,” Shanti admitted, “but it is always worth it.”

While students and staff at Prescott College turn their attention to our campus gardens, the Green Mountain Center has begun preparing for the Worldwide Climate and Justice Education Week, the first week in April. Prescott College has been a participant in this global event since it began in 2022, and this year, we invite students, staff, and alumni living around the world to share challenges and solutions from their own regions. If you would like to be involved, please contact Zach Czuprynski at [email protected].

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 even 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, and 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].

  • Create a rich sense of community on the Prescott College campus for students, staff, community members, and alumni from both Green Mountain College and Prescott College
  • Continue national leadership in sustainability education through residential and online activities, and create an online presence that celebrates the work done by students, faculty, and alumni of GMC and Prescott College
  • Encourage and support project-based courses, independent studies, senior projects, and co-curricular activities based on finding alternatives to unsustainable practices, using the Prescott College campus and its surrounding region as a laboratory for solutions-based learning
  • Serve as an incubator for sustainability research, consulting, and community organizing, and curate materials generated by these efforts
  • Facilitate place-based education and online connections between bioregionally focused organizations around the world, building on the distinctive bioregional approach to distance learning developed at GMC and now carried on through Prescott College’s graduate programs

Contact Us

Green Mountain Center Staff

Laird Christensen
Co-Director

Eleanor Tison
Co-Director

Zach Czuprynski
Sustainability Coordinator

Request a GMC transcript through Parchment.

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