SERVICE

Level: Gold

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Description and Reflection:

As an Eco-Ambassador, I was involved in a lot of education and awareness campaigns at UMBC. I learned that UMBC has a goal to become carbon-neutral by 2075. One thing that we did was educate students on ways that they can decrease their carbon-footprint and be aware of how their actions affect the Earth. One major task that the Sustainability Matters office worked on is the Green Office Program. Through the Green Office program, faculty and administrators can play a role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The eco-ambassadors aided in helping offices achieve these goals as well as certifying and acknowledging them.

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Serving as an Eco-Ambassador meets the expectations of the Grand Challenges service experience. It allowed me to become a more active member of the campus community as well as identify ways I could make my own social impact. This is directly related to my Grand Challenge of Restoring and Improving Urban Infrastructure because I engaged in a variety of projects at UMBC that will deal with ways to make the campus more sustainable that will improve both the quality of life and also raise awareness of the benefits and outcomes of various activities such as recycling, composting and saving energy. 

Program Learning Objectives:

Persistence: As an eco-ambassador, it will be important to remain persistent in the face of challenges when working with administration and other student organizations to implement sustainable initiatives at UMBC. It is also important to be persistent when trying to change students’ behaviors whether it is carrying a plastic container and fork for lunch or using the correct recycling/disposal bin.

Flexibility: It will be important to remain flexible to other people’s concerns and voices when working on initiatives on campus. Also, some other ways that I practiced flexibility was not being able to do everything that we had planned for that semester because of people’s schedules and time conflicts. In addition, it is important to be creative when planning initiatives such as campus awareness on composting or saving energy.

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Service Learning Objectives:

Community Engagement: As an Eco-Ambassador, we were able to hold different types of events such as food waste dinners to engage the students and faculty in discussions related to eco-friendly living and how we can reduce our carbon footprint.

Civic Agency: My role as an Eco-Ambassador allowed me to be a proactive member of my campus community and communicate way we can all change our habits to live more sustainably.

Capacity for Reflection: Through discussions with different campus members such as facilities management and faculty as well as students, we were able to reflect on how much we as a community are progressing towards our sustainability goals.

Additional Learning Objective:

Capacity for Social Analysis: Through this experience, I learned just how much impact student voices can have on making a change on campus. For example, one issue students had was problem with sorting recycling in commons. For this reason, recycling is now single stream. In addition, we learned how different members of administration worked towards sustainability goals and the different work groups at play: transportation, energy, recycling/waste. 

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