UW Sustainability's blog

The Renewable Energy Scholarship Foundation is now soliciting applications for scholarships which will be awarded for the 2021-2022 school year.

Hi everyone, I’m Kalina and I am the UW Sustainability Project Assistant. I am a first year graduate student pursuing a Master’s in Public Administration through the Evans School. Before coming to Seattle, I lived in Wisconsin for all of my life and attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison where I received a BS in Community and Nonprofit Leadership. My passions are directly related to community health and how we can better our systems to improve the lives of those around us.

UW graduate student Jonathan Chen has created a UW Food System COVID-19 Survey to better understand how COVID-19 has impacted people's access to food on UW Seattle’s campus. Anyone affiliated with UW Seattle who is 18 or over is invited to participate and enter a drawing to win a $50 gift card to the University Bookstore. Documenting your experience during this difficult time can help improve things for the future.

Take the survey

Harborview Medical Center received a 2020 Top 25 Environmental Excellence Award from Practice Greenhealth. The Top 25 Award recognizes hospitals who are leading the industry with innovation in sustainability, demonstrating superior programs, and illustrating how sustainability is a core part of their culture. This is the ninth consecutive year for Harborview to receive the top award from Practice Greenhealth.  

Feedback from the University of Washington community on the UW’s draft Sustainability Strategy and proposed actions has been published.

The draft Sustainability Strategy was released on Earth Day, April 22. All members of the UW community were invited to take a survey to provide input on the draft - including the guiding principles and targets - and proposed actions.. Those survey results and comments have been compiled and are available as a PDF document.

The 2020 Environmental Justice Conference, hosted by the College of the Environment's Diversity, Equity & Inclusion office, works to bring awareness on environmental and climate justice initiatives, as well as to create a space for dialogue across scales, affiliations, and worldviews. This is the third annual version of the conference, and the first to be held entirely online.

This is a guest post from 10-year-old Sharda Shah, the daughter of Mauli Shah who works in UW Medicine’s IT Department. As they have been looking for projects at home, this Earth Month they found a solar cooker sitting unused in their shed and decided to try it out. Here are Sharda’s thoughts on using a solar cooker, and how it shows solar energy can be useful even at small scales.

Guest post by UW Farm manager Perry Acworth

Wearing calf-high rubber boots, knit hats, gloves and full foul weather gear - overalls and hooded jackets - two farmers, keeping 6 feet apart if not more, commence transplanting hardened-off, 2-inch high multi-colored Swiss chard. Rain, and then hail, falls the entire day from gray, swiftly moving, cloudy skies. Two times the sun managed to come out, offering a brief break in the downpour.

The College of the Environment's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion team at University of Washington (UW) will celebrate its Third Environmental Justice Conference on April 7, 2020 in Alder Hall. This conference emerges from an ongoing conversation across UW departments and community leaders regarding how to foster equitable collaborations with local and global communities.

The UW American Indian Studies Department and Na’ah Illahee Fund invite Individual, Panel, or Workshop abstracts for the “Living Breath of wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ” Indigenous Foods Symposium to be held on May 1 & 2, 2020 at the University of Washington’s wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ Intellectual House.

Submissions are due on January 20, 2020.