While social distancing restrictions have changed the way clubs operate on campus, many organizations of wonderful students are still coming together to work towards a more sustainable campus! Learn more here.
Williams Environmental Council
The Williams Environmental Council works to make the campus and student body more environmentally friendly and conscious through events and campaigns targeting specific environmental issues we’re facing as a community. Particular problems that have been addressed include waste from campus social functions, consumer waste, and tree cover on campus. We love hearing from students, staff, faculty, and community members so that we can more effectively work towards greater change.
Williams Sustainable Growers
The Williams Sustainable Growers plans and manages the two gardens on campus and distributes the harvest among students. The group also aims to promote awareness of and access to sustainable food and agriculture. We host events and have weekly work parties in the garden open to anyone!
Sustainable Living Lab
The Sustainable Living Lab (SLL) offers students interested in sustainable living an opportunity to practice the lessons they’ve learned in their classrooms in a supportive dorm community. The SLL encourages residents to prioritize behavioral changes that would decrease their carbon footprints from the source so they can be more aware of the impact of daily consumption behaviors. We recognize that building, maintaining, and supporting an intentional community around student sustainability and environmental efforts take a considerable amount of mutual understanding, so community-building is particularly important to the overall house mission. As one of the first colleges across the country to have a sustainable living option, we hope that the SLL will push the envelope on how students can enact change for a more optimistic carbon future.
The SLL is Williams’s first TAPSI house and is supported by staff at the Zilkha Center and the Office of Campus Life. The SLL is pleased to work with campus collaborators. Previous events that the SLL has co-facilitated include the Mohawk Forest gift exchange, apple cider-pressing, and film screenings. Jaya Alagar ‘22 and Huijun Huang ‘22 are the 2021-2022 Co-community Coordinators.
Purple Bike Coalition
The PBC is a student run organization that intends to provide bicycle maintenance services to Williams students and the greater Williams community, while educating people on the processes used to repair the bike. PBC mechanics will teach bicycle riders simple maintenance techniques and try to give riders the skills to fix and maintain their own bikes. The PBC will replace simple parts and perform the maintenance free of charge. The PBC will conduct a free bike rental program for students, staff, and faculty. The PBC, affiliated with the Center for Environmental Studies, looks to improve the quality of cycling on the Williams campus by providing safety and riding tips.
WRAPS (Williams Recovery of All Perishable Surplus)
WRAPS packages leftover dining hall food into individual meals made up of a grain, protein, and vegetable. We freeze these meals before delivering them on Fridays to our community partners in North Adams.
Kinetic
The purpose of Kinetic is to cultivate a social innovation incubator committed to designing and implementing creative, non-political, sustainable, scalable solutions to pressing social issues in the Berkshire region. Kinetic teams, which are comprised of 4-8 Kinetic members, work on a particular issue in three distinct phases: research, design, and implementation. Kinetic members work to understand the entire landscape of an issue and to discover gaps where they can intervene and create systemic change.
Divest Williams
The group calls on Williams College Trustees to screen out all future investments in the top 200 fossil-fuel companies, within five years, divest the endowment of all direct and indirect investments in these same companies, and reinvest in opportunities that will reduce the college’s reliance on fossil fuels and companies that will enact solutions for climate change mitigation and adaptation. They work closely with The Williams Endowment Initiative, a group of alumni with the same goal.
For more information about and a list of student organizations, visit the Office of Student Life website.
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