Education for Sustainable Living Program

by Katie Maynard & Soumil Mehta

Education for Sustainable Living Program (ESLP) is a program to empower students to set up their own courses, inspire students by bringing in speakers on sustainability, and to encourage collaborative efforts between students, staff, administration, faculty, and community members. We were founded as the research and outreach component of the California Student Sustainability Coalition (CSSC) and have been working hand in hand with UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, UC Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara City College. Since our conception we have been evolving from a student-initiated program to a student-community collaborative. Students connect with the experience and knowledge of both other student groups and community-based organization to develop projects that meet the needs of both the campus and broader community.

During 2004-2005, ESLP at UCSB was composed of a lecture series, small discussion series, retreat, student-led group studies projects/courses, and trainings to support the above. During spring 2005, we had our 2nd annual ESLP lecture series that explored how we can reweave our communities utilizing a vision grounded in ecology, sustained by ethics and propagated through design. The series also provides a theoretical background and inspiration for students researching these issues within the university and interested community members.

As a result of the lectures in Isla Vista, students and members of Santa Barbara and Goleta communities have built connections for future sustainability endeavors and bridged the town/gown divide and break down of the IV stigma. Many community members told us that they had not been in Isla Vista for as much as twenty years and that it is a surprisingly nice community. This gathering of diverse group people at the lectures is a powerful demonstration of how dynamic and incredible Isla Vista can be.

Another one of our annual events is a retreat at Zaca Lake. One student recalled: “The ESLP Retreat has given me a much-needed opportunity to express myself in creative activities and in love towards others. The University setting is filled with various opportunities to learn and expand your understanding of the world, but there is all too often a lack of time or freedom to be creative and fully explore your individuality. Oddly enough, there is also little room to realize your connection with the rest of the universe. We fall in suite with the schedules, guidelines, assignments and expectations of academia and our culture of modernity.”

These intergenerational retreats engage students with perspectives on reverential ecology. We are exposed to a range of topics that recognize and respect the essential diversity of life forms: bio-diverse agriculture instead of chemical-intensive mono-cultures, upstream watershed preservation and restoration rather than large dams, local economies and trade enriching culturally and biologically rich localized communities not large scale globalized trade.

These retreats have inspired community members and students to take action and spread concepts of sustainability even further, inspiring the concept of ESLP itself. With the continued support of IRE and increased student involvement, the retreats have blossomed from 40 participants with 20 students in 2003 at La Casa de Maria to 200 participants with 130 students at Zaca Lake.

The last part of our program consists of group studies projects which empower students to design their own education through the creation of courses that directly apply to the local community. Any undergraduate can come to us with a project that they think is needed in the community and we will help support them in creating a course. Then through experiential learning, and a process of discovery and self-education, they are able to develop life long learning skills.

Our classes provide an innovative way for under funded services to meet their needs. For example funding for outreach has been reduced at a statewide level. So, students got together and created the Asian Pacific Islander film project. This project brought together film studies majors and Asian American Studies majors to create a video for the Asian Resource Center which depicted the issues and complexity of the API community at UCSB.

ESLP has created 26 group studies projects crossing over 11 campus departments and has collaborated with Engineers without Borders and the Mechanical Engineering Department to support several more. We have formed working relationships between the staff and administration that have helped ensure implementation of our programs.