Campus Action & Sustainability

In honor of the third year anniversary of the Deep Water Horizon Disaster, USF's Student Environmental Association (SEA) and campuses across the country partnered with Oceana to fight against offshore drilling and seismic airgun testing in the Gulf. The action took place on Saturday at the Earth Day Tampa Bay event at the USF Botanical Gardens. Seismic airguns are used to find oil deep beneath the ocean floor and have devastating impacts on the environment and marine wildlife.

This week we started our action to get the President of MSU to meet with us to talk about the current energy plan. Because she denied our request to meet, and we are instead meeting with the Vice-President, we have decided to send her letters (increasing in number by day) and wind-turbines constructed of boxboard until she agrees to meet with us. Here is my letter, the first one to be delivered to her:

Dear President Simon,

This is the introductory blog post from Cultivating Intergenerational Leaders, our Summer of Solutions program in Washington DC.  Grand Aspirations is sharing stories from our local programs to keep the powershift community updated on our work!

Greetings friends! This is Josephine and Jeremiah from the DC program, Cultivating Intergenerational Leaders.  We are a new program that is working on creating a project that will engage middle and high school youth, college students, and senior citizens around issues of food justice. Last month, we hosted the January Gathering, where program leaders from other cities such as Arleta, CA, Reno, NV and the state of West Virginia came together to participate in a training to prepare us to organize and host a Summer of Solutions program in our home communities.  This training was held at the Steinbruck Center at the Luther Place Memorial Church, which works to provide youth, students, and adults with the tools to address the root causes of poverty.

Going to school instate, in Kentucky, was not my first choice- not by a long shot. In fact, it was essentially my last choice. And I tried to be positive about staying, but it was hard.