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Sustainability for businesses and institutions like universities is getting defined in a
couple of different ways. One, is that it's a place where you bring together your financial
concerns, your concerns about the environment, and also your social concerns...so...and you're
trying to reduce risk on all three of those. So any place where they come together is a
place that we might call a sustainability point that we can work on. Universities, I
think, naturally go toward this; I mean, in a way you could say that our product is the
future. We're the ones who are producing the people, the inventions, the ideas for a future.
So...um...so...a management style that lends itself to improving our chances in the future
is kind of a natural for a university to take on.
Even when they were defining sustainability for the campus in our sustainability plan
-- which was published in 2010 -- the mission was fairly simple. It echoed those three pieces
I mentioned earlier: financial, environmental and social considerations. But it also added
one that's very important to this university, which is regional. So, the fact that we are
an urban, regional campus, it's in the University's mission, and that is becoming apparent in
things like the development of an energy hub. I think we're going to find over time that
there are a lot of other aspects where the University is able to act as a central point.
This University has a very strong Urban Institute, having a School of Architecture, a strong
School of Engineering, as well as the new energy center, EPIC, those are all going to
be strengths and I think we're going to find many more. Some of the faculty recently having
garnering some large grants to look at social sustainability in the region, and they're
beginning to provide products, conferences, things like that to bring to community together
to talk about social aspects of sustainability. So, I think some of those will go, may even
surprise some people when we start to go beyond the technology, the buildings, the engineering
aspects, and we begin to show people what a large university can really bring to these
questions of sustainability in the region.