School of Sustainability Graduate Culminating Experiences
Student capstone and applied projects from ASU's School of Sustainability.
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- All Subjects: 49
- All Subjects: community development
- All Subjects: Economic
For the community engagement piece of the project, existing community engagement protocols and frameworks were compared. The most effective strategies were then selected and combined into a single adaptive framework. Assets Based Community Development, the Sustainable Neighborhood for Happiness Index, and the six types of capital are used as the foundational structure of the Community System Map. A Community Food System map was then organized using a “hub” approach, and the Residential Edible Landscaping map was organized based off of field experience. The nested systems illustrate just how complex the community food system really is. The outcome of the project is the first iteration of an adaptive tool that can be used by for-profit or non-profit organizations to co-create and interdependently manage local community food systems.
Therefore, the team decided to develop a project called Sun Devils Together which addresses the needs of ASUs students facing homelessness and overall aims to help increase the accessibility of available resources through reducing the silo effect that occurs due to lack of communication between different departments and increases faculty, staff, and student awareness regarding the issue. In order to achieve this, the team has collaborated with the Assistant Dean of Students to produce a training module for ASU faculty, professional staff, and students. The team is contributing information to the creation of a new website that will have all the resources available to students in one place. In addition, the team will create a coded pamphlet with a map of resources that will be given out to different departments around campus that students may potentially reach out to for help while informing those departments regarding the existence of other departments that work towards the same cause.
COVID-19 brought so much uncertainty into the world and has molded this project into what it is today. The first project journey that was chosen was meant to show the impact of how much plastic waste was being produced at Starbucks. Then due to COVID-19 yet again, it changed into how much paper waste there was within the State of Washington Department of Licensing (DOL) Business and Professions Division (BPD). DOL BPD is a state agency division that licenses over forty plus professional and business licenses to the residents of Washington state. Due to the pandemic, the project transformed into how the three pillars of sustainability impacts remote work within BPD. BPD is in this new and unique paradigm where the deliverable that was brought forth as this project completed are, “The 9 Benefits of Sustainability through Remote Work” (Appendix D) where this specifically showed DOL why remote work is sustainable and how it should be implemented even further throughout the agency. This list was put together with the benefits that best fit DOL BPD.
This project is creating a non-profit green building organization called AZ Build Green Coalition. There is currently no statewide neutral organization for knowledge sharing about various green building initiatives throughout Arizona. Multiple municipalities in the state are now interested in and starting to execute green building initiatives through varied processes. Yet, each municipality is remaking the wheel and select green building champions in each city usually lead these efforts without a lot of funding or capacity. A central source for knowledge sharing and education would be instrumental in facilitating faster and more efficient movements with green building initiatives and codes. For example, the city of Scottsdale is in the process of being the first municipality in the nation to adopt the newest version of the International Green Construction Code (IgCC). This project has been involved in and aided in that initiative. The city of Tempe has initiated three IgCC 2018 pilot projects. Other municipalities in the state are interested in the IgCC and several have previously adopted it on a voluntary basis. Sharing resources and code approval barriers through a central forum would be beneficial for faster progress and also navigating the political barriers more effectively. The non-profit aims to assist with this collaboration and future high performance building initiatives through tools such as: public presentations, a central sharable document repository, an online presence, and other collaborative tools.