After talking with students, faculty and staff around campus, the Sustainable Students Organization made the decision to focus its efforts toward proposing a Green Fund petition. The petition will be a starting point to develop a sustainability committee in order to manage a specific fund reserved for "green" projects on campus.

The SSO was inspired by Southern Illinois University Carbondale to begin the Green Fund petition after visiting the SIUC campus to learn about how students gained campuswide support in implementing the idea. Elaina Mensinger, events coordinator for the SSO, explained how SIUC students collect and utilize their Green Fund on campus.

"We wanted to see a campus in a rural area very similar to ours even though their student body is about twice as much as ours," Mensinger said. "We wanted to learn how they tackled sustainability, how it's working for them and how they got public interest and campus support. At Carbondale it's a $10 fee per semester that goes straight to an office that handles that funding. Any student, faculty member or anyone part of the campus, can send in an application for a green funded project. They'll outline it and give [the committee] some data they need and then that committee will decide if that's a project they want to do."

James Grosch, president of the SSO, explained, "The money that students give, stays with the students".

"That money is going directly to that department or committee who is handling that money," Grosch said. "It's not just put into the general fee for whatever the campus decides they want to use it for. It's for that committee to be working with it and doing the projects. I kind of see this as a stepping stone to get students aware of how little our university is doing for the environment."

SIUC's Green Fund has compensated for many sustainability projects on its campus, and the SSO hopes to adapt some of those ideas for Southeast's campus.

"One of the specific funding projects we looked at was the lighting in the theater department," Mensinger said. "The theater department asked for a Green Fund project application and they got LED lighting. It is much more energy efficient and it's a lot easier to use for the lighting crew for plays. The price for the lights up front of course is expensive, but the cost that they're saving on the lights being more energy efficient is paying off obviously. That is just how a department you think wouldn't apply to the fund, is applying that grant money."

According to Mensinger, the SSO has been collecting data about how much trash students produce on campus by location and whether or not that trash goes into a recycling bin or a trash can.

"We're finding this huge difference in recycling bins versus trash cans on campus; 63 percent of bins on campus were trash cans, the rest were a different type of recycling." Mensinger said. "We're going to do an experiment to see if it is true that if we increase recycling bins in an area, do students divert their trash into recycling now, if it is recyclable, or do we find that they are still ignoring the recycling bins and still putting it in the trash can?"

The first project the SSO wants to implement with the Green Fund is getting more recycling bins at locations around campus.

The next step for the SSO is to continue their data collection and create a campus survey in order to find out students' views on pushing more sustainability projects on campus through the Green Fund petition.

"We've already talked to President Vargas to see what his support was with [the Green Fund], and he was really supportive of our initiatives. He was really receptive to us and we let him know that our campus needs to be as competitive as other campuses that we're seeing. Campus Life will issue our survey for us."