Month: February 2017

These guest speakers had a major impact on my initial thoughts regarding my issue (campus composting) through the lens of community organizing. The guest speakers, Greg Pace from Columbus Community Bill of Rights and Jessica Mathews from 2 Wheels and Heels/Parklets in Columbus, gave me a lot of insight in the next steps to community organizing. Greg Pace and the Columbus Community Bill of Rights, works with a group of individuals who together try to stop Fracking in Columbus Ohio and other Midwest towns to keep clean water for city residents. Jessica Mathews is an individual who has a passion for safe places for pedestrians to walk and ride their bikes freely through city streets. She believes that people have just as many rights as cars do in cities, and should be allowed to take back city streets. Their inspirations came from making common people lives better: with clean water and clean streets. Greg’s work started almost ten years ago when fracking became a serious source of extracting oil and Jessica got her inspiration from visiting other cities such as San Francisco who had safe “Parklets” for their citizens. Their platforms for their issues gained attention through simply talking to people. Greg said he stands outside places for hours, such as the on campus Wex-Center, talking to passersby about CCBoR and the issues they fight. He said normally everyone he talks to signs his petitions and keeps up with their group. Jessica uses social media to get her ideas across Columbus. Her bike group 2 Wheels and Heels has a Facebook group and the Parklets get attention through local news groups and other social media sites i.e. Facebook and Instagram. This gave me inspiration to possibly create a social media account directly relating to on campus composting to get opinions from students and faculty to see if they would utilize this idea. When these speakers came to ENR, it made me realize as long as you are passionate about an issue and work with like-minded people, anything can be accomplished. There are always going to be people who have similar ideas, but may not have the resources to start a project, so you must be the voice for them. The biggest takeaway from this class session is getting confidence to start working on this idea because I know with the right amount of effort and determination it will definitely become implemented on our campus. As of now, I would personally like to start getting opinions from other students about starting composting on Ohio State’s campus to see what their thoughts are. Hopefully, we will see a great response.

My issue is to start campus composting through out Ohio State University. Our focus right now is to just start a small composting project at the 12^th avenue bread company on West Campus. All of the to-go boxes and plastic wear are made from bio-degradable materials however, there is no compost bins or composting center on campus.

Community organizing plays a huge role in the context of my issue. We need to get our office of sustainability, waste managements, energy department, dining services, and administration on board with this idea. Our campus will have to build a composting center, which will take a lot of money, time, and new staff members. If the community is not impressed by this idea, there is no way that composting will ever be available on our campus.

At the moment there are several other groups trying to work on composting at Ohio State, the organizations that I know of are Zero Waste and Real Food OSU. Zero Waste is an organization that after big sporting events cleans the stadium and surrounding area and instead of bringing trash to a landfill moves it to a composting site. Each game they set up a tent and educate people on the importance of recycling and composting. We will be in contact with this organization soon to find out how exactly the transportation compost works.

I believe challenges that we will face when trying to get the community involved in our issue is trying to get the “man power” to start this idea. It will take a lot of time in the beginning to get everything in place and then even more time to keep things running smoothly. While the campus will be able to hire full-time employees to keep up with this work, a lot of it will be student run. Finding the time to complete class assignments and volunteer with the composting group will be a hard thing to time manage. However, it will definitely be worth it in the end. I do not think it will be a problem to find people who will want to help out with this issue. It is such a large campus and so many students are concerned with the environment and making a greener campus, it will just be finding enough students to work due to busy schedules.

The most important thing to consider when thinking about community organizing and my issue is find out what is the best way to get in contact with people. Should we set up a table on the oval? Create multiple social media accounts? Go to sporting events? We need to find a system to get the most people involved in short amount of time.

For the justice-orientated citizen model, the personally responsible citizen is met by sharing the composting issues on social medias such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. A participatory citizen would organize meetings and school-wide events to teach people the importance of recycling and composting. A justice oriented citizen would start a composting system through out their campus.

Though not a TedTalk, I found a video on YouTube that addressed the issues of community organizing. The video was a skype call with a girl named Jenessa Gilarski, a freshman who attends University of Wisconsin- Stevens Point who works for her campus office of sustainability. She started a composting around her campus i  n classrooms, dining halls, and resident halls. She said that at her campus they have a waste education center with a compost pile in the back that is manually turned with sand and other organic matter. Once the compost is ready it is applied back to landscape through out their campus and football fields. The key takeaways I got form this video is it is extremely important to outreach to campus staff and students about the issue. Jenessa said to reach students campus wide you should create a Facebook page or if you are trying to reach a worldwide audience you should create a twitter. She said on campus set up a table and talk to students and make sure to have incentives: such as t-shirt give away or cookies. She also said to start this project with a group of people and do not do it alone. She works a part-time job, is a full time student, and works at the composting center and said time management is key to have a successful outcome on all your projects.

I am very excited to start this project and get people involved with making a greener and happier campus!