Kelsey DePorte
College of Charleston senior Kelsey DePorte is on a mission. Nearly everything she does is a step toward making the world a better, more sustainable place.
Her minor is environmental studies. She earned class credit for making residence hall move out more sustainable. She’s interning in the Office of Sustainability. She’s an activist – organizing a trip for 10 students to the People’s Climate March in New York City on September 21, 2014.
Living Sustainably
What she really wants is for her fellow students to live sustainably. Living sustainably means being careful not to waste natural resources and looking for ways to reuse things that might otherwise go in the garbage.
Sustainable Move Out team
“We live in a throwaway society,” DePorte says. “But students at the College of Charleston do want to live sustainably if you can get them past the feeling that they’ll be stereotyped as radical tree huggers.”
In spring 2014, Deporte along with environmental studies minors Sylvie Baele, Callie Rhodin, Molly Milstein, Amber Ruby and Dennis Moore, created a Sustainable Move Out campaign to reduce the amount of trash that piles up when students move out of their residence halls. Part of a for-credit internship, the project cut down on trash and increased donations to Goodwill.
RELATED: College participates in a national pilot program for sustainable move out.
The campaign was part of a larger effort in reducing move out waste on campus through the Give and Go! program (a partnership between the Office of Sustainability, the Office of Residence Life and Goodwill). Overall, the campus increased donations by 36 percent over the previous year and decreased landfill waste by 24 percent.
“Overseeing the class credit part of this project in the spring was rewarding for me as both a teacher, but also member of our campus community and the Lowcountry bioregion,” notes professor Todd LeVasseur, who teaches in the environmental studies program. “It’s inspiring to witness students become educated and then empowered to think and act differently in regards to environmental metrics and issues of social justice, and this project is exactly that: inspiring. Hopefully it gains traction with the rest of the student body who live on campus in the coming years.”
Moving Forward
Teaching DIY ideas at Accepted Student Weekend
Now, DePorte is now asking her fellow students to live sustainably after they move back in. Through her internship in the Office of Sustainability, she is helping to bring more sustainable ideas into residence halls – like DIY craft projects using recycled materials and teaching students to make herbal stress remedies.
RELATED: Learn about the new Sustainability House Cup, a competition to be named the most sustainable place to live.
She’s hosting another clothing swap as part of the Center for Civic Engagement’s Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week. “This time,” DePorte says. “We will be shifting the focus from an entertainment-based event, to emphasizing alternative ways of diverting waste and how that overlaps with the sharing economy and sustainability. The Office of Sustainability will still be involved this year since the ECOllective grant we got last year was integral in making the April clothing swap a success.”
And this is just the beginning.
