Podcasts might be the next step toward making Penn greener.
Last week, Penn's Green Campus Partnership - an umbrella organization for all efforts to improve environmental awareness on campus - launched a Web site that links to all student- and administration-led initiatives to improve environmental sustainability on campus.
The new site - the latest in a series of projects the University is undertaking to make the campus greener - will serve as a hub for groups like the Penn Environmental Group, FarmEcology and the Environmental Sustainability Advisory Committee, as well as projects like PhillyCarShare and TerraPass.
These kinds of steps toward sustainability are a long time in the making.
Nearly three and a half years ago, College seniors Bonnie Waring, Michael Poll and Undergraduate Assembly Facilities co-chairwoman Sarah Abroms worked with a group of faculty and students to found the Green Campus Partnership.
The GCP - originally intended to coordinate campus sustainability efforts and to provide a forum to discuss solutions to make Penn greener - became obsolete when it lost staff and faculty involvement.
So, in Oct. 2006, Waring and Poll approached the University Council with a list of recommendations to improve Penn's sustainability efforts.
After Penn President Amy Gutmann signed the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment in Feb. 2007, the GCP became "a University-wide initiative," Poll said.
"In just a few years, more and more people got excited within the University about the sustainability agenda," Senior Facilities planner Dan Garofalo said.
The site is intended to feed that excitement. Abroms hosts podcasts about environmental efforts - the first of which features PhillyCarShare - that will be featured on the site and iTunes. The podcasts will include theme music composed and performed by Facilities and Real Estate Services communications director Andrew Zitcer.
The Web site will help centralize Penn's sustainability efforts, Abroms explained.
"Penn is already so decentralized, and the only way to truly be effective in our ability to be sustainable is to centralize it," she said. "We need a baseline to know where we're at now to make sure we can measure our improvement."
FRES Vice President Anne Papageorge said she hopes the site will draw attention to Penn's sustainability efforts from peer institutions both nationally and internationally.
"Just by increasing awareness and information, we actually are seeing change in behavior," she added,
But Abroms doesn't think the site will drastically change University efforts for a greener campus. She said only a "culture change on campus" will allow the GCP to accomplish its goals.
To see the Web site, visit www.upenn.edu/sustainability.
