Cal Poly Humboldt
PAE-19: Community Sustainability Partnerships

The University partners with the local community for activities ranging from service projects conducted formally, via Service Learning or other formal course work settings that incorporate service such as performing analyses that offers sustainable solutions for real world problems; to sustainability related service and activities conducted by student organizations such as the Natural Resources Club, or the Youth Educational Services (YES) Environmental Education project. In the last year alone HSU teamed up with more than 74 community partner organizations. Some of these partnerships that focus on sustainability in the last few years include: The HSU Center for Service Learning and Academic Internships (CSLAI) has maintained a sustainability partnership with the local County Food Bank, Food for People, for over six years with manifold efforts to address food security, hunger and sustainability needs. Two food drives are organized each year: the holiday food drive gathers on average over 1,000 pounds of canned and packaged food donations each year both on campus and in surrounding neighborhoods; the second drive at the end of the Spring semester collects unused “meal points” from students in the residence halls and transfers these points into dollars to purchase healthy protein foods for their summer Backpack for Kids program (in 2012 alone, over $4000 worth of food was donated to this program). Other activities of the CSLAI include raising plant starts to distribute to local senior housing projects and low income groups to enable them to grow their own produce. The CSLAI also spearheaded a local campaign for the National Garden Writer’s Association’s Plant-a-Row for the Hungry program, in which rows of produce are planted and donated to the local Food Bank. This campaign distributed program materials and garden resources and also developed a Plant-A-Row Wiki collaboration tool that allows K-12 Educators and schools in Humboldt County to share garden-based education materials. Each year the CSLAI also organizes the HSU Day of Caring in a partnership with the local United Way of the Wine Country. The event gathers an average of 300 students in a half day event serving dozens of sites in the community in order to address community and sustainability needs and build capacity at sites that include local elementary schools, a tribal health center, a homeless youth shelter, the Humboldt County food bank, trails, community gardens, coastal cleanup on local beaches, etc. Among dozens of courses offered each semester across the campus that focus efforts on sustainability issues and service to the community, one outstanding example involved Spring 2012 HSU environmental engineering students from Lonny Grafman’s Introduction to Design class, who worked on new green innovations and installations at the Friends of the Dunes’ Humboldt Coastal Nature Center. Ten student teams designed and installed a wide range of projects including an outdoor amphitheater, solar-powered trail lighting system, interpretive displays and a beach grassbaler.

Additional information on specific service learning courses can be found at: http://www.appropedia.org/Engr215_Introduction_to_Design_syllabus or see a list of other example Service Learning courses offered specifically by the HSU Environmental Resources Engineering Dept. at http://www.appropedia.org/Category:Service_learning_courses.