Colorado Rocky Mountain School Work Crews offer meaningful work & create sustainable lifestyles

Oct 26, 2009 6:09 PM ET

Colorado Rocky Mountain School Work Crews provide an avenue for students to take leadership roles and initiate change on campus toward creating a more sustainable life.

  • The Recycling Work Crew maintains recycling stations in all the dorms and major buildings. They collect recycled materials and take them to the local recycling center.

  • In the Garden Work Crew, students work to provide the school community with healthy organic food that is grown in a manner that minimizes the toll on the land.

  • The Sustainability Work Crew brainstorms and problem-solves ways to improve our school’s efficiency. From educating the campus to adding weather stripping to all the obscure doorways on campus, the Sustainability Work Crew takes a variety of steps to minimize needless electrical, food, or heat waste. This Work Crew program allows passionate students to initiate change. Various student-led ideas have included: creating a sustainability dorm competition, a sustainability newsletter (humorously named The Toilet Paper), and a weekly “Green Tip” announcement to the entire school; changing our cleaning supplies to all-green products, measuring the campus energy usage, insulating the windows and doors, and researching better methods to improve our sustainability. While this work crew’s primary goal is to focus on sustainability, the rest of the work crews on campus (from Ranching to Electricity) also act under the green umbrella of sustainability.