Student Sustainability Organizations
There are numerous campus groups and clubs for students to get involved in. For a full list of student clubs, please visit the Skidmore Student Government Association's club page or explore SkidSync to find each club's page. Below is a list of clubs and groups that students who work with Sustainable Skidmore are often a part of.
Environmental Action Club (EAC)
EAC is a community of students committed to promoting sustainability at Skidmore and within the lives of Skidmore Students. This group connects members to activism opportunities in the region and on campus. Click here to find more information about how to get involved.
Feedmore
Feedmore is run through the EAC. Members take leftover food from the dining hall and donate it to soup kitchens in Saratoga. To get involved, click here.
Outing Club
The Skidmore College Outing Club facilitates hiking, climbing, canoeing, and adventuring trips for people of all experience levels. This group is a great way to try out hiking for the first time, and it is a helpful network to find easy transportation to explore nature. To look through their upcoming events on Skid Sync, click here.
SGA Sustainability Committee (SuCo)
This group of students works within the Student Govenment Association to deepen sustainability efforts in student life and with campus student policy. To become a representative, students should contact SGA. Click here to learn more about SGA’s Sustainability Committee on Skid Sync.
SuCo was created due to the need for representation of sustainability within the Student Government Association (SGA) to help reflect student interest and momentum around the topic. Because other student issues have led to the creation of committees and positions on SGA, a similar approach was proposed for sustainability by Talia Arnow '13 beginning in fall 2011, which led to the creation of the initial committee in spring 2012. At the same time that the committee was formed, a sustainability senator position was also created. The sustainability senator is charged with chairing the SGA Sustainability Committee (SuCo). Other committees on SGA include the Committee on Student Life, Budget and Finance for student clubs and events, Academic Council and Committee on Diversity Affairs.
SuCo was proposed in fall 2011 and officially created in the spring semester of 2012. The committee functioned well, but during the fall 2012 semester committee members felt it was necessary to alter the membership of the committee to reflect a more holistic scope that covered all of the three pillars of sustainability. Therefore the membership and structure of the committee was altered and reorganized in order to reflect the social, economic and environmental aspects of sustainability.
During the fall 2012 semester, SuCo wrote a status report, a compilation of all student-led sustainability initiatives dating back to 2003. The status report was written with seven topic areas: food, waste, transportation, green buildings, land management, energy and academics. The report is a continuous work in progress and will be updated yearly as more initiatives are initiated and completed.
In the spring of 2013, SuCo fully adopted the new structure, with new membership and a new mission and vision. SuCo helped put on multiple events linked to sustainability and partnered with many student groups to increase awareness and education of sustainability on campus. The two biggest achievements of SuCo were supporting the writing of two resolutions to be presented to SGA Senate. One of the resolutions is a sustainable food purchasing recommendation. This resolution was created through a collaboration between SuCo and the Real Food Challenge student group. The other resolution is related to a divestment campaign for the college, a collaboration with the Environmental Action Club, who began the divestment campaign during the 2012–13 academic year.
In recent years, SuCo has pursued a variety of creative projects. In 2015, Maya Cohen '17 worked to develop a sustainability survey for incoming first years. Through 2017-18, Zoe Pagliaro '20 designed a food waste outreach program in the Murray-Aiking Dining Hall to curb excess waste and spark behavior change.
