EcoFest is UMBC's annual celebration of Earth Day, hosted by Students for Environmental Awareness. It's a week-long event, featuring a Green Festival as our central festivity!
We would love to offer your organization a table at our festival on the quad.
Who: On and off campus organizations, students, staff, and community members
What: A Green Festival with music, games, speakers, performances, food, crafts, giveaways, and more!
When: Monday, April 20, from 10am - 2pm
Where: The Commons Quad (rain location: Commons Gameroom)
Why: We want to have an opportunity to collaborate with you! We're sure we can find intersections between both of our missions.
Our goal is to showcase the connections between our mission (of living green+sustainably/celebrating the outdoors) and yours! These connections are EVERYWHERE, and they aren't hard to find. We want to let the UMBC community know that ALL of our groups' causes are related and affect each other in positive ways.
Student organizations like yours are what makes this entire event as fantastic as it is every year!
Join us on April 20th! Here's a couple ways your organization can participate:
1. Staff a table (or blanket, or teeter-totter, etc.) for all or part of the time.
2. Bring a festival activity with an earth-friendly theme. This can be your chance to showcase what your organization does, and/or it can be unrelated. Games, trivia, info, fundraisers, freebies, and more are all acceptable! Show UMBC your member opportunities and upcoming events, too.
3. Advertise the Green Festival through your networks!
We'd love to meet or talk with members of your organizations for an hour or two to hash out how our missions are connected - how sustainability relates to your org. Together we'll be able to figure out a cool activity you can do, too. We're pretty flexible with scheduling this!
If you have any questions at all, please contact a few of the Green Fest organizers at:
nnaik1@umbc.edu (Nisha Naik)
rups1@umbc.edu (Rupini Shukla)
These are some of the on- and off- campus groups who have already expressed interest:
Environmental Task Force
The Garden
Shazam Ultimate Frisbee
GES Council of Majors
Eco-Ambassadors
Vegetarian Society
SUCCESS Program
Lutheran Episcopal Ministry
Arbonne
MD Department of the Environment
Sierra Club
Chesapeake Climate Action Network
Will you join us?
Goals of the program include enhancing students’ knowledge and skills to successfully communicate sustainability to their peers, increasing overall student awareness of environmental actions and ways to effect individual and group change on campus, and institutionalizing environmental stewardship within the student body.
Eco-Ambassadors will also partner with UMBC staff committees to assist with promotions to the student body on one of the following focus areas:
- Energy conservation
- Waste reduction and recycling
- Transportation
- Education and Service
View full job description here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NDvscVJUWBdBKdx1T8Iqz61_u4Rh3KOIxE92uq9oSyg/edit?usp=sharing
What is RecycleMania?
RecycleMania is a competition between universities of all sizes to promote waste production on campuses across the country. Over 8 weeks UMBC will report our recycling and trash collection rates to RecycleMania Inc, a non-profit made up of various university sustainability coordinators. Our rates will be compared to other participants and ranked according to overall efficiency. Efficiency is determined by total amount of recyclables, least amount of trash, highest recycling rate, and other variables. For more information about the competition visit www.recyclemaniacs.org.
UMBC’s Goals
In 2014 UMBC was ranked in the top 100 of 273 participating universities and we want to continue towards the top of the heap. To accomplish this Sustainability Coordinators on campus are implementing new, permanent signage at trash sorting locations in the commons, residence halls, RAC, and other locations on campus. There will be a variety of celebrations and competitions on campus as well, running 8 weeks from the beginning of February. Faculty and staff in addition to clubs, residence halls, frats, and other student orgs will be participating over the course of the competition to promote sustainability on campus and move UMBC to the forefront of the national sustainability movement.
How Can You Help?
Check out sustainability.umbc.edu for any information you’ll need about sustainability on campus. The website contains various guides and links to help you go green at home, at school, and in life. For information on helping to coordinate the competition or other sustainability events during the year, email tanvig1@umbc.edu.
Event Schedule:
-Kickoff Fair on Commons Mainstreet – February 5th 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
-Weekly Recyclemania Tabling Events: Commons Mainstreet from 12-1 PM
- Wednesday 2/11 @ 7 PM: Zero Waste GreenOut Men's Basketball game vs Stony Brook University
- 2/22 – 2/27: "Trash on Your Back" Challenge
- Thursday 3/12: BoxMania fort party starts at 8 PM in the fort
Other events will include a talk given by a local green architecture firm, and many more awesome chances to get involved with sustainability on campus. Be sure to check out sustainability.umbc.edu/recyclemania to stay up to date on event additions and opportunities to win big by catching the #GreenGrit.
Fri May 16, 2014 6AM to 9AM
Santa's House (@ Catonsville Fire Station)754 Frederick Rd, Catonsville, MD 21228
Participants in Bike to Work Day who stop by the event location will receive a free t-shirt, commuting guide, and a chance to win prizes. Coffee & refreshments provided. Simply bike to work, and stop by 754 Frederick Rd. Register here.
Bike to Work Day is a national event to encourage and celebrate bicycling to work and promote public awareness of bicycling and bicycle safety. Locally, it's a part of Maryland's Clean Commute Month in May. Register here.
Late Spring is the start of the ground-level ozone season, when we hear about Code Red and Orange Ozone Action Days. On these warm smoggy days, the air is dangerous to breathe – especially for the young and for the elderly. Emissions from single occupancy vehicles(driving alone) contribute approximately 20% of our region's dangerous ozone levels. Driving alone also results in increasingly congested roadways and parking issues. We can save money, protect the environment, stay in shape and have fun while biking.
Transportation accounts for 38% of UMBC's carbon footprint. In 2007, President Hrabowski committed to campus carbon neutrality.
Resources onUMBC's sustainable transportation alternatives are listed at: http://sustainability.umbc.edu/transportation/
These sustainable transportation options have been developed and promoted by the following groups. If this topic is of interest to you, consider getting involved:
Along with Team Drive-Less (a proposal to install a car counter at the Commons Garage to indiciate when it is full), the proposed project, 'The Garden@ UMBC' won the top number of Prove-it votes with 70% of the students voting for the community garden. The organizers have been building momentum and partnerships and seeking approval and space for over a year. They're now asking anyone interested in a garden plot to use their Food Plot Application.
In their own words:
Students, Faculty, and Staff can indicate their interest in a plot in the garden by registering with this form: Food Plot Application."We're building a community food garden on UMBC's campus. We are growing food, and a lot of it! If a Master Gardener used the space we've been provided, we could grow over $39,000 worth of food a year--that's incredible.
In addition to that we're trying to bring all of UMBC together: all majors, all interests, every kind of student to show that we all can contribute to something together. The actual space is a collaboration of Mechanical Engineering students and Linehan Visual Art Scholars, we've already had three classes from three different departments incorporate our project into their curriculum, and the Undergraduate Research Awards have already begun to be doled out.
Above all, The Garden is a model for how students can change their university. Research doesn't just exist in the lab, and service doesn't have to be at an off campus service site. We don't have to go to someone else for those opportunities. As students we can create them on our campus on our terms. We've already established the pool of campus and community partners to support every kind of engagement possible, and now we need the students.
Let's grow UMBC together."