To: The Wellesley Community
From: Yui Suzuki, Chair of the Advisory Committee on Environmental Sustainability
Re: Advancing Sustainability on Campus
Date: April 26, 2018

Yesterday, Wellesley was honored to welcome former Vice President Al Gore to campus as the 2018 Wilson Speaker. The event provided a unique opportunity for Wellesley to hear from Gore, today’s most respected, most committed voice in the ever-growing environmental movement, and to think about the College’s own sustainability efforts.

Sustainability is and will continue to be a central pillar in a 21st-century liberal arts education. One of the major goals of Wellesley’s Sustainability Year is to develop guiding principles unique to the College that will inform our sustainability priorities and efforts. The Advisory Committee on Environmental Sustainability has drafted a set of these principles based on the results of the sustainability survey community members took last fall as well as the College’s mission statement and similar initiatives at other institutions.

We are tremendously grateful to the participants of the community forum, co-organized by the Albright Institute and the Paulson Initiative, whose feedback we incorporated. These principles provide a framework for helping our campus community become more environmentally responsible and will ultimately inform and guide the implementation of the 2016–2026 Strategic Sustainability Plan, approved by the Board of Trustees in 2016, which provides detailed action items for improving the College’s sustainability performance. As we finalize these principles, we are sending them out to the Wellesley community for input. Please send your comments to sust@wellesley.edu.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who have contributed to the Sustainability Year in so many different ways, giving your time, energy, and resources to jumpstart awareness of sustainability on campus. We hope that these conversations will continue in the coming years as the College moves towards a more sustainable campus, one that inspires positive change for the local and global community.

To receive updated information on Wellesley’s Sustainability Year and the Wendy Judge Paulson ’69 Ecology of Place Initiative, sign up for the sustainability newsletter.