Pomona College
EN-3: Student Life

Pomona for Environmental Activism and Responsibility (PEAR):
PEAR is a student environmental club that seeks to challenge students and administrators to think critically about the impact of their everyday actions on the environment and its communities. PEAR tackles environmental issues holistically and remains open to a broad definition of environmentalism. PEAR's goal is to promote individual and institutional changes through grassroots activism. The club hosts awareness campaigns, events, educational programs, and advocates for policy changes.

The Pomona Organic Farm:
Pomona's Organic Farm and student Farm Club promote sustainable food production and a greater understanding of food and agriculture through both academic and co-curricular spaces. The community garden space focuses on small-scale plots, perennial tree fruit production, and sustainable/land-integrated agriculture. The academic space emphasizes experimentation and larger-scale crop production for teaching and learning (though still small, biodynamic, Permaculture-based practice). Both spaces practice 100% organic agriculture methods. The mission of the Farm is twofold: first, to provide the students, faculty, staff and community members of Claremont with a means for education exploration in the fields of Permaculture, organic farming, alternative architecture and sustainability, and second, to provide a working model of ecologically-based crop production. The Farm hosts events year-round and is also home to chickens, bees, a solar oven, and other tools for sustainable living.

Green Bikes:
The Green Bike Program is Pomona's student-run bike shop aimed at promoting safe and informed cycling at the Claremont Colleges. Green Bikes maintains a fleet of up to 100 bicycles, salvaged from bikes abandoned on campus, which the program distributes to students free of charge on a semester basis. Green Bikes also maintains a shop and education/event space where members of the 5 College community can have their bicycles repaired, at only the cost of replacement parts. The program's emphasis is on bicycle education and works to teach everyone who comes into the Green Bikes shop how to repair their bicycle. Green Bikes aspires to a future where every cyclist understands their bicycle and everyone is a cyclist.

Pomona's Organic Farm promotes sustainable food production and a greater understanding of food and agriculture through both academic and co-curricular spaces. The community garden space focuses on small-scale plots, perennial tree fruit production, and sustainable/land-integrated agriculture. The academic space emphasizes experimentation and larger-scale crop production for teaching and learning (though still small, biodynamic, Permaculture-based practice). Both spaces practice 100% organic agriculture methods. The mission of the Farm is twofold: first, to provide the students, faculty, staff and community members of Claremont with a means for education exploration in the fields of Permaculture, organic farming, alternative architecture and sustainability, and second, to provide a working model of ecologically-based crop production. The Farm hosts events yearround and is also home to chickens, bees, a solar oven, and other tools for sustainable living. During the summer months, the Farm makes CSA boxes available to faculty, staff and students for a weekly buy-in fee.

The ReCoop redistributes unwanted reusable items (including furniture, appliances, clothing/shoes, and school/office supplies) by collected unwanted items and selling them back to the campus community or donating them to charitable organizations. ReCoop is responsible for generating its own operating costs through their sales and other events. This program reduces the purchase of new items and the disposable of reusable items across the campus community. This operation is managed and run by students, with assistance and advising from the Sustainability Integration Office. Students are responsible for logistical details, budgeting, pricing, marketing, and other elements of running the enterprise, as well as long-term strategic planning, investment in equipment and infrastrcture, and making enough money to sustain the program financially with several thousand dollars in additional earned revenue that is given back to sustainability programs at Pomona College.

Throughout the academic year, Pomona College hosts a number of sustainability events, sponsored by academic departments, student groups, the student government, and administrative offices (Office of Student Affairs, Office of the President). Events for 2013-2014 included: the Environmental Justice Film Festival; LA River Conference; Water Scarcity Conference, "Environmental Racism as State-Sanctioned Violence" lecture by Laura Pulido, and many, many others. There are one to four speakers on campus any given week that address specific areas of sustainability. This week is the opening reception entitled "Ecotones" at the East Gallery and a talk by Tiffany Tai on Sustainable Solutions in the Peace Corps. The Sustainability Integration Office also partners with Sustainable Claremont, a local grassroots organization, to offer a sustainability dialog series the first Monday of every month.

For the past several years, the Mellon Elemental Arts Initiative, Environmental Analysis program, and the SIO sponsored annual themed sustainability arts and cultural events on campus. This year, Pomona hosted "PetroLA: A Symposium" and the concurrent "Petrochemical America" exhibit at the Pomona College Montgomery Museum of Art. It included a student-made documentary, “How to See a Southern California Sunset."

Pomona's Outdoor Education Center is one of the nation's premier outdoor education programs and provides a broad array of services, equipment, and other support for outdoor education. It's mission is to provide the Pomona College community with educational, recreational, and social opportunities that focus on local communities and global environments. Using the outdoors as a classroom, its programs strive to offer co-curricular outdoor experiences that develop leadership skills and promote responsibility, while maintaining balance between personal, professional, and academic pursuits. The OEC houses two of the College's long-standing outdoor programs - On the Loose, and Orientation Adventure. On the Loose is the outdoors club of the Claremont Colleges and dispatches student-led trips to destinations across California and the Southwestern states. OTLers backpack, climb, car-camp, surf, bike, and more. OTL offers advice to those who are lost, cars to those who need transportation, and a wide-ranging assortment of gear to all students – all for free. OTL also provides extensive subsidies for trips. OTL teaches "leave no trace" principles and instructs its leaders how to reduce the environmental impact of trips. Orientation Adventure is an education-based outdoor program for all incoming first-year students, taking new students into natural areas across the Southwest to learn about Leave No Trace, sustainability, outdoors skills, community-building, and more.

The Sustainability Integration Office moves through each year with chosen themes for each month, with educational programming centered on the chosen month's theme. The monthly newsletter article, chosen events and EcoReps bulletin boards in residence halls work together to engage campus constituents on the month's chosen theme. Themes for 13-14 were: outdoor appreciation, food, waste, consumption, environmental justice, energy, and water.

The EcoReps program, managed by the Sustainability Integration Office, focuses on peer education of sustainable living behaviors, focusing on life at Pomona, and translating to life beyond graduation. The EcoReps program works within the SIO monthly themes to engage residents in life skill education through events such as the PowerDown/ Get WaterWise competition, No Impact Week, Food Day, the campus Waste Audit, and more. Students are taught tips on how to conserve in certain areas and reduce their environmental impact.

The Sustainability program at Pomona College hires about 77 students each year, many as Work Study students, in the following capacities:
2 Clean Sweep/ ReCoop managers
35 Clean Sweep staff
15 ReCoop staff
2 ReCoop Book Room staff
2 Green Bikes Managers
5 Green Bikes staff
4 Compost drivers
9 EcoReps
1 SIO staff researcher
1 sustainable dining coordinator
1 Greenware/ Checkouts coordinator
2 Green Office coordinators
1 SIO graphic designer
2 full-time summer staff working on Annual Report metrics and reporting

The Sustainability Integration Office utilizes data and metrics gathered on a wide variety of sustainability indicators to tailor co-curricular educational programming toward areas that need improvement. This varies from year to year. In 13-14, that meant a bigger push in the area of compost awareness with a Compost Awareness Day and dining hall compost competition, and special Vampire Energy event at Halloween. The Take Back the Tap campaign has also started this semester to roll out educational programming in the form of water bottle surveys and a blind water tasting. 14-15 has seen a lot of activity around water conservation with the California drought. The Ralph Cornell Society (native plantings) sponsored a sprinkler slip-n-slide and an EcoRep water pledge.