S*

From Sustainability

1 Update
2 Mission
3 History
4 Past Activities
5 People

Update

S* has been merged into the new group, Sustainability@MIT, along with SfGS, SAVE, Generator, and the Sloan Sustainability Speaker Series. This consolidated team is reaching a critical mass that we hope will carry the sustainability movement on campus to the next level. The information below is maintained here for historical record keeping purposes.

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Mission

S* is the Sustainability@MIT Student Working Group. We are an energetic group of students from around the Institute interested in bringing principles of economic, social, and environmental sustainability into the curriculum, research, and operations of MIT. We believe MIT has a unique contribution to make by building knowledge, developing practitioners, and walking the talk towards a sustainable future, and our vision is for MIT to become the sustainability leader among the world's universities.

Our approach is to build alliances for change both bottom up and top down - to fuel a social movement of student groups, faculty, and staff, while simultaneously working with the President's Office, senior administrators, and the Corporation to generate high level support for sustainability as a core principle and value at MIT.

Our "theory of change" can be found here in PowerPoint format (or view S* theory of change as GIF).

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History

S* was founded in January, 2006 by Kate Parrot (then a masters student in TPP) and Dina Goldstein (an MIT Sloan MBA student). Their goal was to unite the many initiatives around MIT related to sustainability and begin the process of real institutional change.

S*'s first action, in spring 2006, was to coordinate a response to the MIT Energy Research Council (now the MIT Energy Council). This included a letter to President Hockfield, signed by a number of prominent faculty members and a broad sample of students around the Institute. The letter emphasized that the Energy Research Council was one among many sustainability related activities on campus, and that the moment of the ERC's launch represented an opportunity to bring broader issues of sustainability into the awareness of the MIT community. This effort not only brought us into ongoing conversation with the President's Office, but gave us an opportunity to connect with faculty and students around campus.

In a follow-up response to the ERC launch conference, we argued that the Energy Initiative was focusing too narrowly on issues of energy supply and the development of new technologies. We argued that greater emphasis was needed on energy demand, and the need to decrease energy use through efficient technologies and behavioral change. We also argued for the overriding importance of the Walk the Talk dimension of the Council's work - that we must lead the charge to a sustainable energy future through a commitment to renewables and efficiency in MIT's own campus operations.

In the fall semester of 2006, we organized ourselves as a weekly independent study to continue focused work on bringing sustainability into MIT. We met on Thursdays from 8:30-10 and from 4-5:30 in E53-301. During the morning session we learned together about sustainability and change strategies appropriate for the MIT context. In the afternoon we worked on design and implementation of tangible projects around campus. Our learning agenda was self-defined and self-organized, and was overseen by Sloan faculty member Anjali Sastry for credit.

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Past Activities

We conducted several projects that sought to energize the emerging movement around sustainability at MIT. With a coalition of student groups and operational departments at MIT, we conducted an event on November 14th 2006 called the MIT Generator: Students Walking the Talk on Energy and the Environment. The event embodied our approach of fostering collaboration across student groups, developing connections among sustainability-related activities on campus, and helping MIT walk the talk as a sustainability leader. We also initiated a Sustainability Speaker Series at MIT Sloan and co-sponsored an Environmental Films Festival during IAP 2007, both of which enhanced visibility and awareness of sustainability issues around campus.

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