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UMass Eco-Rep Program
Fostering environmental literacy within the UMass Community

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The Eco-Rep program is an academic class in which students teach other students about sustainability and environmental education. Students gain a basic understanding of all sorts of topics, ranging from waste and recycling, industrial agriculture, climate change, energy, and much more. They also get an opportunity to interact with and educate their peers about what they've learned by putting on monthly events that seek to change campus behaviors.

During the Spring 2013 semester, the Eco-Reps

put on "No Impact Week", trying to get the campus community to reduce its carbon footprint,
participated in a Divestment campaign from fossil fuels, and
will be helping run events at Earth Day.

A next step for the program is to move from Eco-Reps simply participating in events to actually proposing, planning, advertising, and implementing a small, impactful project related to sustainability in their residential area or central campus. This promotes our goal of student empowerment. We would like to be able to provide a small grant to each of the 6 Eco-Rep classes which meet weekly (10-15 students each) to help them get started. Some examples might include: implementing dorm-based compost bins, setting up a used item recycling system with Terracycle, implementing a sculpture on campus about wasted plastic water bottles or office paper, etc. We always have a bunch of creative and energetic students each semester who are just itching to do projects like this, but we have been unable to help them thus far.

View Website: UMass Eco-Rep Program