This is taken from a presentation the TEA team made to Chabot’s Facilities Committee. The TEA team was advocating for bond monies to be allocated to the construction of a Sustainability Center. 

The Chabot community is passionate about protecting and sustaining the planet’s climate, ecosystems, water, and overall health. But our responses, our actions, here at Chabot are most often carried out individually--a teacher introducing climate change concepts in the classroom, a staff member doing their own recycling-- and so it is difficult to build synergistic change. 

The Sustainability Center offers an opportunity for an institutional response on the part of Chabot College. Chabot rightfully prides itself on its many pioneering programs and initiatives developed over the years. However, when it comes to responding to this crisis, we are not in the forefront, nor are we pioneers. In our research we counted over 150 Sustainability Centers in colleges--and even high schools--across the nation, with many of these Centers being housed at community colleges. A Sustainability Center should not be just some feather in the cap of a privileged 4-year institution. A Sustainability Center is as crucial to the health of a college as it is to the health of the planet. 

The idea of compartmentalizing knowledge into disciplines, which is how our college is mainly organized--and of course most colleges are organized--this is literally a 500 year old construct. Of course there are good reasons to operate this way, but it also has serious limitations, especially for confronting problems as wide-ranging and interconnected as the Climate Crisis. 

The Sustainability Center can bring together and leverage ALL the disciplines in service of working together to address these problems. Why place the burden only on the environmental sciences; all the disciplines can contribute and would be supported in the Sustainability Center. 

The Sustainability Center brings instructors and staff together into a living building with collaborative instructional spaces that support projects and Action Learning. The Sustainability Center will feature: modular glass walls, indoor spaces that open up to outdoor gardens, moveable and flexible wet and dry labs, outdoor food and energy demonstration gardens, maker spaces for Action Learning, and community gathering spaces so that the center can leverage community expertise. 

The Sustainability Center will not only be a net positive carbon building, it will also teach net zero practices across the disciplines and support students on the campus and in the wider community to move towards zero waste. The building itself--its systems and surrounding gardens and grounds--will be a teaching tool, and be an integral resource, to serve the greening of curriculum across the campus. 

No one argues that the creation of one building will halt the challenges faced by Mother Earth, but the Sustainability Center signifies that Chabot plans to do its part--and more. The Center galvanizes our intentions.