Four students and two student teams will each receive up to $2,500 for projects they designed to support sustainability goals on campus and across northern Arizona as part of the Center for Sustainable Environments’ Henry Hooper Student Fund Sustainability Award.
The projects align with the university’s Campus Sustainability Plan, which models living and working sustainably both on and off campus. This year’s recipients are:
- Vince Mariola, graduate student in the Sustainable Communities program, who will evaluate the feasibility of carbon offsets through a tree planting effort in Ghana.
- Roberto Nutlouis, graduate student in the Sustainable Communities program, for a project with the Indigenous Youth Coalition of Pinyon on the Navajo Nation to plant native shrubs and trees in water catchment basins, teach the benefits and stories of native plants, and hold trainings in food preparation and wool dying with native plants.
- Kathleen Curran, graduate student in the Sustainable Communities program, to support her direction of Greening the Revolution, a 50-minute documentary film that will examine the globalization of food systems and illustrate community efforts around the world to create alternative food systems.
- John Campbell, graduate mechanical engineering student, to design and build a simple, low-maintenance and inexpensive water purification system using wind energy to manually pump water from shallow wells into a gravity-fed filter for purification. The system will be designed, constructed and tested at NAU for implementation through NAU’s student chapter of Engineers without Borders in Ghana in 2008. The water purification system will also have application to sites in the Southwest and Mexico.
- Lindsay Dudney, freshman psychology major, Mattie Dundas, junior education major, andJennifer Clark, graduate student in history and women’s studies, to develop a teaching module and materials on sustainability and psychology, including a bibliography on key psychological concepts relevant to understanding climate change.
- Jessica McGrath and Ian Dixon-McDonald, both graduate students in the Sustainable Communities program, to create a garden on campus to teach the NAU community about growing food locally. Showcasing native and heirloom species appropriate to the Colorado Plateau, the garden will serve as a lab site for courses that teach about food systems and will include interpretive signage about the practice and benefits of locally grown foods.
The Henry Hooper Fund was established in 2001 to honor and recognize Henry Hooper’s dedication to environmental programs at NAU. Hooper was associate vice president for Academic Affairs, Research and Graduate Studies, and dean of the Graduate College 1981-1995.
Information about NAU’s Campus Sustainability Plan is online click here.