Sometimes, the best way to teach is to lead by example. At the CSU College of Business, staff and faculty aren’t just showing students how to use business to build a better world in the classroom – they’re also practicing what they preach.
“This is something that we’re teaching: how to operate in a socially and environmentally responsible manner,” said Grace Wright, the College’s special assistant to the dean for sustainability initiatives. “We partner with companies to help them implement sustainability initiatives, we are a leader in sustainable business curriculum and we advance research on responsible business. We also need to practice sustainable operations ourselves.
“We need to operate in the most socially responsible and environmentally responsible manner possible, and those things don’t just happen. It takes leadership, it takes funding and it takes a focused strategy. But mostly, really good sustainability projects take a groundswell of buy-in and collaboration and cooperation to make them happen.”
That’s why the College launched its Green Team in August 2022. Made up of employees from across the College, the team meets monthly to develop operational sustainability goals and initiatives and plan how to make them a reality.
The team’s first project was to analyze a greenhouse gas inventory of the College’s operations, from heating and cooling the buildings to employee commuting. That audit was completed over the summer of 2022 in an effort to better understand what’s driving the College’s environmental impact.
“We started by looking at the greenhouse gas report and identified where our major impacts were to help us pick what our priorities should be,” Wright said. “Additionally, we’ve taken on projects that are important to the different members of the Green Team, we’ve taken suggestions from faculty and staff members and we’ve also collaborated with students to implement some of these projects as well. It’s been a really collaborative experience in the first year.”
The Green Team’s early successes
One of the team’s most successful initiatives in its first year was finding ways to encourage employees to use alternative transportation such as bikes to commute to campus.
“We got a grant from the President’s Sustainability Commission to work on sustainable commuting behavior with our employees,” Wright said. “We did a survey to identify how people were getting to work and what barriers there were to sustainable transportation, and we designed a number of programs in partnership with Parking and Transportation Services to help target some of those things.”
One of those programs was the Replace a Ride Challenge, which ran from April 17 and May 28 and is running again through Oct 14. It incentivizes employees to try alternative transportation for their daily commutes. During the spring challenge, 32 employees opted for active transportation for 828 total trips – a savings of 3,067 miles by car.
“Even this morning, I had an email from an employee in the College of Business that said, ‘I just want to let you know that in the last three months, I haven’t driven my car to work, and that is the impact of your initial challenge, and we’re thinking about going down to one car household because of it,’” Wright said.
Other colleges at Colorado State University have started thinking about following in the College’s footsteps by creating alternative transportation programs of their own, Wright said.
“The College of Business is acting as this incubator for some of these sustainable transportation initiatives, so that’s one thing I’m really proud of,” she said.
The Green Team also worked with the Net Impact Club, a student organization, to launch a composting initiative and has been collaborating with the CSU’s facilities team on ways to conserve energy in Rockwell Hall, Rockwell Hall West and Rockwell Hall North. Some of that work – like making improvements to building efficiencies – happens behind the scenes, but it can make a big difference, Wright said.
Empowering each employee make an impact
The Green Team’s work is part of a College-wide momentum toward more sustainable operations, Wright said.
“When you elevate a culture of sustainability, everybody sees their role in it,” she said.
Over the next year, Wright hopes the Green Team can build on the progress it has made while collaborating with others in the College to launch new initiatives.
“I’m just really excited to see how we can continue to help each person recognize their ability to make an impact in what they do every day,” Wright said.
For example, over the summer she emailed the College’s faculty asking them to shut down any electronics in a classroom if they’re the last person to teach in it that day.
“This is not an exaggeration: I heard back from every single faculty member saying, ‘Oh, I had no idea – thank you for letting me know, I’ll do that,’” Wright said. “That is the big, ultimate goal: that we all feel empowered to make choices and to work together on making our operations as sustainable as they can be.”
About CSU’s College of Business
The College of Business at Colorado State University is focused on using business to create a better world.
As an AACSB-accredited business school, the College is among the top five percent of business colleges worldwide, providing programs and career support services to more than 2,500 undergraduate and 1,300 graduate students. Faculty help students across our top-ranked on-campus and online programs develop the knowledge, skills and values to navigate a rapidly evolving business world and address global challenges with sustainable business solutions. Our students are known for their creativity, work ethic and resilience—resulting in an undergraduate job offer and placement rate of over 90% within 90 days of graduation.
The College’s highly ranked programs include its Online MBA, which has been ranked the No. 1 program in Colorado by U.S. News and World Report for six years running and achieved No. 16 for employability worldwide from QS Quacquarelli Symonds. The College’s Impact MBA is also ranked by Corporate Knights as a Top 20 “Better World MBA” worldwide.
