Sustainable Living EDU, an online training on sustainability designed by students, is available for the entire campus community via the Cal Poly Portal.
The 30-minute training covers topics such as consumption, fossil fuels, water, transportation and waste management.
The training was designed by a group of students from several majors, led by environmental sciences and management graduate student Kalea Conrad.
“I noticed that there wasn’t any type of universal information about sustainability for all students and staff and faculty,” Conrad said. “We had to come up with a really dynamic project that could reach a wide audience that included a lot of stakeholders.”
Inspired by classes she took for her sustainable environments minor and her work with Green Campus, Conrad wanted to make information on sustainability more accessible to students, faculty and staff.
Graphic communications alumna Annika Furr expanded the project to its current online format for her senior project in fall 2022.
One of the project’s advisors and Cal Poly Sustainability Coordinator Kylee Singh said Furr’s senior project helped bring the training to the next level.
“It’s been a really cool project that students have been trying to get pushed through for years, so Annika doing it as her senior project really helped make it happen, so that was really exciting,” Singh said.
The course includes six lessons with open-ended questions or an activity at the end of each section to get participants to think about the material as it relates to their own lives. The course ends with a final quiz and a resources page for those who are interested to learn more.
Singh said she hopes the training will serve as an introduction to living more sustainably, but folks shouldn’t stop there.
“There’s so much work that needs to be done and that there’s all sorts of ways in which sustainability can be interwoven into your career,” she said.
The training is currently optional, but Conrad said she would like to someday make it mandatory for the Cal Poly community so it can reach a wider audience.
The biggest problem, according to Conrad, is getting people to care about today’s environmental issues.
“It has to be personal I think, for people to care, which is kind of the challenge because there are so many impersonal problems in the world,” Conrad said.
One way the project aims to make the information more personal to the Cal Poly community is by making all the information specific to San Luis Obispo and Cal Poly, such as waste management policies in the county and sustainable transportation strategies specific to the Cal Poly campus.
Conrad said she hopes it “plants a seed of inspiration” in people to get involved in projects that address environmental issues.
“It’s going to require concerted, ongoing effort as a collective society if we’re going to make the changes that we desperately, direly need to live in sustainable futures,” she said.
