Members of the Georgetown community from both the main campus and law campus on Sept. 11 to discuss the future of sustainability at Georgetown. Powered by the concept of “smallify-ing” larger problems into smaller risks, students, faculty, and administrators engaged in group discussions in how to solve the problems of energy, waste, and water on the Hilltop.
Joseph Ferrara, university President John DeGioia’s chief of staff, called the event an example of members of the Georgetown community taking action on the university’s Jesuit values.
“As a Jesuit institution we are called to engage positively in our world, and try to make a positive difference … And so I think this workshop today is a very good example of that,” Ferrara said at the event.
The main goal of the day was to generate ideas about how to solve three sustainability issues on the campus: how to become carbon positive, waste free, and water neutral on campus. Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Christopher Augostini, also present at the event, acknowledged the magnitude of these problems, yet hoped that the talks at the workshop would be ambitious in coming up with solutions.
Lisa Gans, producer of social enterprise at Smallify, a firm dedicated to helping develop innovative solutions to larger problems, facilitated the process of “smallify”-ing the problems in question throughout the day. The technique, founded by Dave Viotti (COL ‘92), is based in design thinking and making “small bets” on “affordable losses” to make a larger social problem smaller and more manageable.
“We like to get to the root cause of a problem. And the way we do that is to take a very big challenge like ones that you guys have been working on, and we try to break it down into smaller components or tasks, which we call small bets. And we try to figure out how we can achieve some of these in shorter time frames,” Gans said.
Danielle Huang (COL ‘17), an intern in the Office of Sustainability, noted how the workshop allowed participants to think about large goals, when they often only get the chance to think about smaller initiatives on campus, that were still achievable through these “small bets.”
Photo: Georgetown Voice/Daniel Varghese
The event came after an August workshop with William McDonough, an architect and innovator of sustainable development, in which students, faculty, and administrators discussed how to take McDonough’s principles of waste free design and apply them to a larger university setting.
“[The August workshop] really brought everyone on campus at the time involved in sustainability together to zoom out and look at where we’re at with a large perspective and to try to sort of redefine how we want to think about sustainability over the next 20 years at Georgetown,” said Ari Goldstein (COL ‘18), GUSA secretary for campus planning.
For Huang, collaboration with faculty and administrators throughout the day reassured her that the future of Georgetown’s sustainability plans could still be carried out even after current students graduate. Moving forward, though, Huang hopes that sustainability becomes a more central concern for Hoyas.
“I think we just need to make sustainability into the norm on campus. Get students to care about it, but so that they don’t even have to think about it. That it’s just normal to start recycling. It’s normal to pick up litter where you see it,” said Huang. “I think that’d be really interesting – changing behaviors on campus.”
Additional reporting by Daniel Varghese
