Growing Your Green Living Program (GLP)
Building your program and finding the people who will give it life involves strong organizational, interpersonal and management skills. This section of the manual takes a closer look at a number of skills and tasks that will be involved in the early stages of developing your new program:
Keep your original motivation in mind as you lay the groundwork for your new program. For this reason, we provide a brief refresher on why it is important that institutions of higher education have student-oriented sustainability programs like a GLP.
This section looks at the framework of the Harvard Green Campus Initiative (HGCI) GLP and includes a discussion of what you might be able to achieve through a similar program. We describe how three key elements—audience, partners and context—will help you customize the basic HGCI model for your campus.
Your GLP will most likely be situated in an existing department or office, which will serve as its host. This more established organization must be able to provide an administrative backbone for your program. Here we review the process of finding a home.
This section provides a few tips on how to continue developing your original GLP budget.
Your program's funding arrangement could take a number of forms, each having different repercussions for how the program is run. Whether you have full or partial funding from one or multiple partners, this section helps you manage it and secure more.
The participants in a GLP hold an array of positions in the college or university, and they have different roles, responsibilities and relationships to each other within the program itself. From the host partner to steering group members, the coordinator and student captains and reps, this section describes the key positions that must be filled to make your GLP work efficiently.
Although there are many roles in a GLP, only three of them will be filled by new hires. These are the coordinator, captain and rep positions. This section will guide you through the seeking, interviewing and hiring process.
A successful GLP season means you have met the program and sponsors' goals while giving your student employees positive learning and leadership opportunities. This section provides a wealth of advice on how to balance sponsors' needs with the special circumstances of your student employees.
Introducing your new hires to each other, the campus community, GLP stakeholders, and the program itself are exciting events. This section describes what to include in your orientations and other ways to get off to a strong start.