Green Office Certification Program: My Experience

This post was written by the Sustainability Office Green Office Certification Program Coordinator, Rissy Mathias. 

Working within the Sustainability Office has been an amazing experience that has shed light for me onto the inner-workings of the campus-wide plan of sustainability. UCSC is a campus that truly strives to integrate sustainability through student-led initiatives backed by staff involvement. Working in the Green Office Certification Program, I have enjoyed interacting with the staff and faculty of UCSC. This experience has helped me acquire skills such as interacting professionally and effectively outside of just my classroom experience.

My time at the Green Office Certification Program has allowed me to creatively tackle sustainability issues within this sector. My co-worker, Alana Mandrick, and I were able to integrate the evaluation of water practices into the certification program. Currently, we are finding a more efficient way to evaluate the energy practices of the offices on campus. We have done this by creating self-evaluation questions to receive perspectives from participating offices and by creating a system to check water systems within the office. This picture included shows some of the questions we ask office members on the self-evaluation calculator that they fill out during the certification process.

Photo courtesy of UCSC Green Office Certification Program

This was an important addition to the Green Office Certification Program, especially when the recent drought is taken into account. None of this would have been achievable without the promotion of creativity and the culture of innovation within the Sustainability Office.