Q&A with co-chairs of Green Campus Partnership Student Association

Founded in 2010 with the goal of promoting communication among Penn’s environmental groups, the Green Campus Partnership Student Association recently elected its new co-chairs — College sophomore Madison Roberts and College senior Abby Waldorf. GCPSA became the official umbrella organization for “green” student groups at Penn this semester. Roberts and Waldorf sat down with The Daily Pennsylvanian to discuss their plans for the upcoming year.

Daily Pennsylvanian: What are some of your goals in the year ahead with regard to Penn’s environmental sustainability efforts?
Abby Waldorf: We run Green Week in the spring. We had our first week last year, and we’ll have our second one this year. We are having a publication that will start at the end of this semester. It will outline all of the accomplished sustainable initiatives of all of our different constituent groups, so people can see exactly what is going on at Penn.
Madison Roberts: Increase dialogue [among the groups]. A lot of times groups are kind of quiet about what they’re doing, and there is just so much opportunity for working together to create events and make them more successful.

DP: How will GCPSA go about ensuring that each group has a say in your sustainability efforts?
AW: We are a different style of coalition group right now. There are so many environmental groups on campus, [but] there really hasn’t been a huge environmental community until a few years ago, so that’s where GCPSA came out of. We are trying to increase dialogue between the groups and create some sort of body of students that can act as representative of the environmental community at Penn, but we are not necessarily sure how that’s going to play out yet. Environmental sustainability goals are so widespread, and there are so many avenues that you can take.

DP: What do you see as some strengths of Penn’s Climate Action Plan? Weaknesses?
MR: It has the weaknesses of any document. It is hard to fit everything into a document, so they focused on five things that are very specific to what Penn can do and what Penn is most involved in. I think that they did a good job in addressing the five things that they chose to address instead of trying to address everything. It’s really great that we even have an action plan. There are a lot of universities out there that don’t. It definitely gives us something to work toward.
AW: GCPSA was obviously not involved in drafting the document [because it was released in 2009], but I think they are trying to incorporate students in the committee, and GCPSA will hopefully play a role in that as well. I think that will give students the opportunity to have a more stable input into the goal.

DP: How do you plan to involve the Penn community in the continued implementation of the action plan?
AW: We are still such a young umbrella group figuring out exactly what the interest of the member groups is in connection with the Climate Action Plan. We have noticed that there are a lot of environmental groups on campus that don’t focus on sustainability within the Penn community itself. One of our members proposed that each group at the beginning of the semester comes up with a way in which they can supplement the Climate Action Plan. We want to support it as much as we can.

DP: What sorts of events do you plan to host this semester?
MR: Green Week will start on March 30 through the first week of April [in addition to] a conference run by the Penn International Sustainability Association.

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