USC’s efforts to save the Earth now have a home base.
On Wednesday morning, President Carol Folt was joined by students, faculty and staff to celebrate the grand opening of the USC Sustainability Hub in Student Union Suite 101.
The campus’ “first-ever” sustainability-focused gathering space will serve as a collaborative core and resource center located in the “heart of the USC campus,” said USC’s Senior Vice President for Administration David Wright.
The Hub will provide students and staff with a space dedicated to cooperating on sustainability-driven solutions and initiatives, while enabling them to seek out further information about sustainability efforts on campus.
The Sustainability Hub will also serve as the new home of Assignment: Earth, the university’s “sustainability framework for creating a healthy, just and thriving campus and world” created by the USC Presidential Working Group (PWG) on Sustainability in Education, Research, and Operations in collaboration with various teams from across the university.
“It’s ambitious, comprehensive, with pillars of education, research, equity and inclusion, operations and engagement,” Wright said.
Built with sustainable materials, the Sustainability Hub features Zoom and two-person meeting pods, open collaboration space, a shared kitchen and a lost-and-found composed of items collected by DPS from around campus which, instead of ending up in landfills, can be taken home by students free of cost,.
The Hub – USC’s newest accomplishment in navigating climate change, “perhaps the greatest grand challenge of our era” – will operate as a location for solutions-based events and conversations, uniting those who “care about creating a sustainable, livable planet where we meet the needs of all people,” Folt said.
“Our Trojan spirit is lifelong, and our people and their impact are worldwide,” Folt said. “And right now, our campuses, our cities, our nations, our planet need that power. They need that connectedness and that spirit more than ever before.”
An early dream for Folt, who previously served as a Dartmouth Professor of Biological Sciences, the space will allow students and staff to “share a love of the natural world,” while accelerating emerging sustainability solutions across campus and broader Los Angeles, she explained.
“I know we’re going to see inspired thinking, and it’s going to come out of this beautiful, light, airy campus space,” she said. “And it’s coming out of the classrooms, the labs, the studios, the offices in all of our campuses.”
J.J. Flores, a junior studying International Relations and Urban Sustainable Planning who serves as co-chair of PWG’s Student Committee, hopes the Sustainability Hub will help students find their “spark” to turn “apathy” — the “biggest climate challenge of today” — into “audacity to believe that a better alternative is possible.”
Flores, who grew up blocks away from USC’s University Park campus, became interested in advancing sustainability in school settings after seeing water bottle refill stations across USC’s campus as a high schooler. Flores helped implement a series of retrofits that allowed their high school to become a pilot location for green high schools across Los Angeles Unified School District. They are currently working on sustainability efforts including a zero-waste move-out program and reusable food container pilot at Everybody’s Kitchen dining hall.
With the opening of an inclusive and accessible environment that encourages exploration and collaboration, Flores believes the Sustainability Hub will empower students, staff and community members to begin cultivating their own innovative solutions.
“This service was made from the start to try to be an inclusive space, and so I hope it’s proactive in that approach and tries to bring in members of the community and makes it clear that sustainability is a space for everyone,” Flores said.
With the capacity and resources to create substantive change and a new space designed to inspire future leaders of campus sustainability, Folt said that “at USC, one of the world’s greatest leading research universities, we have the potential and the passion powered…by our beautiful Trojan family to make great advances at speeds we’ve never before considered.”
While heatwaves, wildfires and Southern California’s first tropical storm in 84 years demonstrate the future threats and current realities of climate change, Folt said that the opening of the Sustainability Hub marks “an exciting time as well” to promote climate education across the campus community and generate new initiatives to advance the university’s sustainability efforts.
“When you know better than anyone else how the problem works, you know better than anyone else how to fix it,” Flores added. “Now, it’s just about being in the room where it happens.”