Alison, the treasure of Skidmore College’s Environmental Action Club (EAC) is inspired to work for environmental change because she's concerned for the current and future well-being of humans and other forms of life. Jonathan, co-president of the EAC, because he can’t imagine not being part of the solution. Thanks to the EAC’s effective campaign, Skidmore has sent a letter to KC declaring that the College disapproves of the company’s practices. Even though we all disapprove of clearcutting virgin forests to make toilet paper, I’m sure we all can agree that getting this letter was no small feat. After a long Thanksgiving weekend, Jonathan, Alison and I finally met up online. Read on to find out about more about the KC campaign at Skidmore.

Ill_Assist_You [IAY]: My good friend from high school went to Skidmore. She has really fun stories about taking gym but no other stories about college. What’s Skidmore like anyway?
Alison [A]: Skidmore is a small (2,400 undergrad students) private liberal arts college in upstate New York. Skidmore is known for its arts curriculums, though it offers degrees in all major areas of study. Most students live on campus (in dorms or on-campus apartments). We are located in the city of Saratoga Springs, a beautiful tourist destination with a lively downtown area, close rural landscapes, and the Adirondack Mountains a short car ride away.
Jonathan [J]: The student body is politically liberal and thus generally concerned about environmental issues. However, activist/political groups on campus find it difficult to draw people to meetings and events. Because of this, many see Skidmore students as apathetic. Some believe that Skidmore College is lacking in its institutional commitment to sustainability. After many years of talk about recycling, this year we are finally putting significant resources into creating an effective recycling program. There are also a couple of buildings on campus that are being heated by geothermal.

IAY: How did the EAC decide to get involved with the KC campaign?
J: This summer I had the wonderful opportunity of attending a week-long Greenpeace training in Washington D.C. called ChangeIt 06. This is where I heard about the campaign and applied to be the campus coordinator.

IAY:  Have you worked on other campaigns before? If so, how does the KC campaign compare?
A: Yes, I've been involved in student environmental action for 4 years now, and this campaign has been very successful compared to some others I have been involved in.
J: I have worked on many EAC campaigns but no national campaigns until now. Last year, the leadership of the EAC decided to localize our actions. As a general rule, every campaign we work on should be local, as in having direct impact on the Skidmore community. In many cases this rule prevents any involvement in national campaigns. Additionally, we seek to choose campaigns that have lasting and sustained results while being relatively easy to carry out (these types of projects we have coined as “big impact, little effort” projects). The KC campaign is wonderful because it fits our criteria but is still within a national movement. I believe this sort of campaign is significantly more empowering for everyone involved.

IAY: What techniques/tactics have proved effective for you in this campaign?
A: Talking to administrators has been the most effective so far. They have been very supportive of our efforts and our conversations with them have lead to them doing more research by themselves and coming back to us for more discussion. Also, we organized a consumer education campaign which reached a broad audience: we passed out flyers about the Kleercut campaign, collected 330 petition signatures to send to Kimberly-Clark, and handed out free boxes of Seventh Generation Tissues to the first 30 people who signed our petition!

IAY:  What have been some of the highlights of this campaign?
A: Talking to people and educating them about the campaign when we were collecting petition signatures - people were surprised to hear that Kleenex wasn't good, willing to do what they could to help the cause, and overall very supportive. Also, talking to our Director of Purchasing, who is a wonderful lady - she is always interested in the information we bring to her and enthusiastic to find out more.
J: It was also good to see the amazing retention in the EAC committee working on the campaign. The committee for the K-C campaign was 7 or 8 strong at every meeting in our general EAC meetings and in other meetings with the purchasing director. I have also enjoyed working with Lindsey at Greenpeace through each step of the process.

IAY: What have been some of the challenges of this campaign?
A: Dealing with the fact that the institutional products that Skidmore buys from Kimberly-Clark aren't as environmentally-offensive as K-C's consumer products. This has made it difficult to convince decision-makers that boycotting K-C's LEED certified institutional products would help our cause.

IAY: With whom (student groups, professors, faculty, etc) have you been working?
A: Other students in the Environmental Action Club, members of the Campus Environmental Committee, people from the facilities department, the director of purchasing, and the buyer for the campus bookstore.
J: Also the Skidmore Shop, which decided to look into alternative products.

IAY: The activist life never stops— with the KC letter under your belts, the EAC is currently tackling four more projects. What are these projects?
J: One EAC committee put together a Ride Board. Another is working on developing support for a solar panel installation on campus. The 3rd group is focusing on developing a marketing plan for the new recycling program that was instituted just a couple of weeks ago at Skidmore. The last group is looking at ways to reduce paper use on campus. We are pushing for all the library printers to print double sided as well as get IT to change the margins in Word to 1 inch.

That's all for now, see you suckers in December!