Hopkins students are continuing to show their support for a "green" university, having just received approval for a new environmental sustainability initiative, tentatively called the Sustainable Hopkins Infrastructure Program (SHIP).
The program, which was approved shortly before spring break, will provide a simplified avenue for students and employees to secure funding and support for green projects on campus.
The program hopes to support projects that will improve energy efficiency and reduce operating costs across Homewood. The University will form a committee of administrators and students who will review project proposals and green-light funding based on their adherence to certain criteria, which have yet to be finalized.
"The overall goals are to get students involved in sustainability and to reduce the environmental impact and operating costs of the university," said Daniel Teran, president of the class of 2011.
What eventually became SHIP was originally pitched by Teran to the Hopkins administration with the support of the Student Council. In its initial phase, the project was billed as a "Sustainability Revolving Loan Fund," and was essentially a pool of capital which would have been loaned to departments with the intention of increasing the fund as the departments saw returns on their green investments.
The inspiration for the Fund was a program called the Harvard Green Campus Initiative, which was implemented by Harvard in 2000. The finalized program, SHIP, bears little resemblance to Harvard's Initiative.
Following the administrative meeting held before spring break, extensive changes were made to the initial proposal - most importantly, there will not be a specific fund from which SHIP projects will draw money, and money will be given to the projects, not lent.
Where the money will be drawn from is not yet clear. According to Davis Bookhart, Hopkins's environmental stewardship manager, the University's financial deans noted that a centralized fund could sit unused if too few of the allotted funds were utilized. Because the academic divisions of Hopkins pay for activities and utilities on Homewood campus, and would reap the benefits of any cost savings, Bookhart noted that they would be the ones to identify funding for approved proposals.
Teran said that projects meeting SHIP requirements will be approved and immediately handed off to James McGill, senior vice president for finance and administration at Hopkins, who is committed to working with SHIP to find funding without taking money out of any predetermined University budgets.
"It's important to emphasize that this is not just a bunch of money sitting around waiting to be spent," Bookhart said.
He further emphasized the strong commitment Hopkins has made to supporting SHIP and its goals.
"It's a commitment for them to say, 'We already have a tight budget, but it's such a good idea and the long term ramifications of environmental stewardship are so good that we'll figure out a way to make it work.'"
For Teran, the most important aspect of SHIP will be its dependence on student involvement and student-generated ideas. Not only will students be encouraged to submit proposals, a process which Teran and Bookhart both hope to make relatively painless, but the committee reviewing proposals will ideally be composed of both students and administrators in equal parts.
"Students are a really important part of this - what other universities don't have but we will have is at least an equal number of students on the board, if not a student majority," Teran said.
Bookhart expressed a similar opinion.
"I think that the board needs to be a pretty good mixture of administration people who have a certain amount of expertise in energy or utilities, so that they can help with the technical details of evaluation, and students," he said, adding that active student involvement would ideally be one of the program's major selling points.
Applications for SHIP committee positions should be available later this week.
Green groups on campus have been expressing their support of the initiative.
"It's a really great way to get students involved in projects that will help JHU meet its sustainability goals, by getting funding for ideas they have and want to implement. It will hopefully pull on the excitement created by the Green Idea Generator," said sophomore Julia Blocher, head of HEAT (Hopkins Energy Action Team).
Bookhart and Teran both noted that SHIP hopes to build on the sustainability momentum already present at Hopkins thanks to the activities of the Green Idea Generator. At least two of the projects to emerge from that program will be eligible for funding under the terms of SHIP's goals and requirements.
Ultimately, according to Teran, SHIP should serve to involve students in promoting and encouraging sustainability at Hopkins, and giving sustainability issues priority on campus.
"Basically, it's fast-tracking sustainability so that it doesn't have to compete with other maintenance projects," he said.
Ideally, the formation and utilization of a committee to specifically assess proposals intended to retrofit and improve the campus in terms of sustainability and environmental responsibility will serve to set such proposals apart from the day-to-day maintenance proposals with which they would usually be clumped.
As with Harvard's Green Campus loan program, Teran hopes that the results of proposals implemented with SHIP funds will be made publicly available, in hopes of encouraging other institutions to implement similar programs.
"I'm inclined to say that our fund has the potential to outperform Harvard's loan fund because we don't have to wait for payback - we're able to constantly be engaging in new projects," Teran said.
