Green Living Program (GLP)

Green Living Program (GLP) Harvard University's GLP is a year-round, peer-to-peer environmental education program. Its funding partners support a permanent staff person who coordinates a team of paid part-time student GLP representatives or "reps." This model works particularly well in student residence halls, where dining halls and common rooms provide natural venues for peer interaction.

Design for your Context

As always, be careful not to import the Harvard model as-is. In order for your GLP to be successful, it must be geared for your campus context. Be creative and willing to adapt the model to your setting. When doing so, consider the following questions:

  • What proportion of your student body lives in the residence halls?
  • Are there other venues for reaching students?
  • Does your school have active fraternities and sororities?
  • Do students mostly eat on campus?
  • Are cafeterias attached to residence halls?

Framework and Funding

Ideally, a GLP would sit within a broader green campus organization, which would provide general oversight, management and mentoring. It is likely that the green campus manager would have begun securing sponsors and defining the GLP's overall organizational framework and budget. Once the GLP coordinator is funded and trained, the green campus manager could immediately hand over the program's day-to-day work to this person. This would free up the green campus manager to work on developing new programs.

The Harvard Green Campus Initiative (HGCI) originally established a funding partnership for its GLP with three departments and has since added another. The program funds one hour of coordinator time for every four hours of student time and pays 19 students, who together work a total of 90 hours per week. Two of these students are captains, who each work 10 hours per week and serve as a critical link between the coordinator and reps. For this number of student hours, the HGCI allots 25 hours of coordinator time. The GLP program's annual budget is about $90,000, 90 percent of which goes toward salaries.

If no green campus program exists at your institution, consider a wide range of options for securing financial, administrative and logistical support for your GLP. Offices or departments that would reap the benefits (financial or otherwise) of resource conservation and efficiency might agree to host or help fund the program. A good first step is to follow the money—find out which department pays the utility bills for the residence halls and start there.

While some organizations on campus may not be willing or able to justify a financial contribution, they may be able to provide administrative or logistical support. Consider departments whose missions align with an element of your proposed GLP. Student employment offices, for example, might see the work and leadership opportunities provided by a GLP as reason enough to commit some resources.

Student Leadership

While staff partners are essential for funding and supporting a GLP, the real energy and creative force of the program comes from its student participants. A GLP needs to be managed in a way that is unique within the campus context. Students must be given the freedom to design their work plans and to determine methods for educating and engaging their peers. At the same time, staff partners must provide enough encouragement, advice and accountability to ensure the program is staying on track with its purpose and goals. The GLP coordinator best able to achieve this fine balance may be someone who has recently graduated from the same student population that the program is seeking to engage. The two captains, mentioned above, would be the program's student leaders.

Partnerships

The increased strategic coordination between students and operations staff is a major advantage of a GLP. The program's paid coordinator helps maintain institutional memory and saves staff from having to repeat information to generation after generation of students. A GLP also unites students with an interest in environmental issues, laying out common goals so that advocates are pulling in the same direction.

When university administrators create a GLP they demonstrate good faith to student environmentalists, who are sometimes inclined to be suspicious of, even adversarial towards, administrators. The mentoring relationship that develops between the program sponsors, coordinators and student participants helps promote mutually beneficial solutions to common problems and concerns.