Starting a Departmental Green Team
Starting a Green Team is a great way to facilitate employee engagement in sustainability within your department and across Boston University. It’s easy to get started.
Advertise your decision to start a Green Team around your office. It should be open for everyone to join!
Send out an announcement for your first Green Team meeting once you have a list of interested colleagues. We recommend meeting monthly to make sure everyone stays up to date with sustainability projects.
Run your first Green Team meeting. It’s a good idea to have an agenda prepared for your first meeting. Here are some possible talking points/activities:
- Pick one or more people who will be heading your Green Team.
- Have your team walk around the workplace and identify a list of improvements to be made. We recommend starting with small projects and working your way up to more challenging changes.
- Utilize the Green Department Certification spreadsheet to choose priority items to start working on. Team members can form subgroups to work on each item or group of items.
- BU Sustainability can provide you with official stickers and signage to display around your workplace regarding things like turning off lights or proper recycling. It’s great to have some of these items at the first meeting.
- Set a goal for department certification, and a process for re-certification.
Keep Meeting! After your first meeting you can use your monthly meetings in a variety of ways. Here are some ideas:
- Your Green Team should build on smaller projects and work with management to create larger goals to support a departmental Sustainability Action Plan.
- Hold inter- or intra- office competitions. Bring in a scale and measure how much waste each unit or department in your building is creating per capita or utilize the sustainability@BU app (if you want to create a custom app challenge for your team, contact BU Sustainability).
- Take fun quizzes to test the team’s knowledge of sustainability issues.
- Watch documentaries on environmental topics or invite guest speakers to come and present about recycling, green purchasing, composting, or any sustainability topic of interest (remember the BU Sustainability Team is available for educational presentations).