What is an EcoChampion?

PHOTO CREDIT: Dave Weatherall

So many of you may have heard yesterday that we banned bottled water on campus. Well this an official shout-out to the students that made it possible (especially Jenna Dunsby, Sarah Jayne King, and Michelle Lamarche). But did you hear about the other official announcement about the EcoChampions? You didn’t??? Well allow me to explain.

Yesterday the office of Campus Sustainability set in motion the EcoNetwork, a group of individuals (aka EcoChampions) that will spread the good word about sustainable development in their departments and units. For the Most part this is an employee program but we are tuning it up to get students involved too.

So what’s the big idea and how does it work. Simple, every month we bring together all the EcoChampions on campus and have a discussion / workshop / brainstorm about how to make our campus greener. The EcoChampions are given tools – like composting bins, or computer programs – that allow them to make changes in their respective offices. And voila... a more sustainable trajectory.

So the reason that this could be really big is that we, more specifically Marc Pandi our Outreach coordinator, works with all the EcoChampions to follow their progress from green sprouts to mighty sequoias... or something like that. And when Ecochampions run into some problems, the power of the network takes over. More specifically, an on-line forum is being created so that champions can share experiences, problems, and solutions.

Anyways, if you want to know more about the program visit the webpage and if you think you know someone who would be interested, send us an e-mail (sustainable@uottawa.ca)

- jon

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