Prof. Karen Theveny and Dr. Laura Guertin, co-chairs of the Sustainovation Team, presented at the 2018 Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) Conference & Expo in Pittsburgh, PA. They presented on Penn State Brandywine’s efforts working with community partners in the first year of the PepsiCo mini-grant/Sustainable Communities Collaborative program at The Pennsylvania State University.

Prof. Theveny (left) and Dr. Guertin present during the poster session. As part of a year-long effort to develop sustainability-themed community partnerships, Penn State Brandywine connected with local partner, Media Food Bank, to address their challenges for addressing local hunger. The culmination of the efforts was a CanstructionU competition during spring semester 2018 in which eight teams of club and class members collaborated to build UN SDG themed structures. At the end of the
competition, Media Food Bank received 2,275 cans estimated at $2,135.

Dr. Guertin and Prof. Theveny gave a 30-minute presentation describing the sustainability awareness and assessment data generated by the Fall ’17 campus activities including: adding an educational component to Tyler Arboretum’s fall festival, bringing mobile technology to update a tree biodiversity quiz at Ridley Creek State Park and students’ essays addressing the SDGs as a resource for a statewide teacher organization. The changes in student attitudes towards sustainable development was documented by participation in a Biasutti & Frate (2017) validated survey conducted before the activities and then again upon their completion. The presentation also included a showing of the 2017 Tyler Arboretum film produced by students in a multi media production class that documented the educational activity conducted during Tyler Arboretum’s Pumpkin Days.

This collaborative poster is an overview of the Penn State Brandywine efforts along with the other campuses that are members of the Penn State Sustainable Communities Collaborative (SCC) network.