WATgreen Committee Meeting

Present: James Kay, Muthu Chandrashekar, Paul Eagles, George Priddle, Winston Cherry, Hamish Duthie, Keith Warriner

1. Presentation by James Kay. (This was the presentation he made to the University Executive and Board of Governors)

He concluded with his own objectives for the committee for the purpose of stimulating discussion:

Expand participation, draw people in

Increase Awareness and communication

Facilitate new participants

Expand leadership

New chair

Expand resources

Internal: people and dollars

External: Grants, contracts, etc.

Strategic Plan for the Environment for UW.

2. Each member of the committee introduced themselves and their interests with WATgreen

3. Discussion of objectives of the committee:

Some points which were made:

• The importance of a well planned strategy for organizational growth to allow WATgreen to move from a small scale operation run by a couple of people to a larger scale operation.
• What are the products of the committee to be? What are our terms of reference? The committee should write its own terms of reference to present to the university. We will consider this at later meetings
• It seems that generally staff are aware of WATgreen and students respond well when they learn about it. However, faculty seem to be the hardest group to reach. A discussion of how to reach faculty ensued. It was suggested that Faculty Council was a good forum to use in Math, Eng, and AHS. Also Math, Eng Soc, GSA etc should be approached. Each committee member was going to think about this further.
• The presentation made to the committee would be appropriate to use but the following should be added:
  • List of concrete successes, output of WATgreen which has already occurred.
  • List of what individual faculty members can do, both for WATgreen and for the environment around campus. (The list should be of simple things to do, hints as it were.)

Next meeting:

1) Remarks from Bob Elliot
2) Report from Patti Cook on Greening Universities Conference.
3) Discussion of working goals of committee over the next few months:

a) terms of reference

b) strategy for the evolution of WATgreen

c) strategy for increasing faculty awareness of WATgreen in each faculty.