Alistair Hall, Sustainability Coordinator, Vassar College

Vassar College is a private, coeducational, liberal arts college in the town of Poughkeepsie, New York.  Vassar’s Office of Sustainability oversees the College’s green initiatives, which includes efforts on reaching carbon neutrality, engaging students, and reducing the environmental impact of the College’s operations.  Vassar’s sustainability initiatives, protocols and practices have earned the college a Gold rating from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE).

So, what do you actually do all day?

My role mostly fits into three main buckets:

1. Operations/improving the school’s environmental impact – projects in energy efficiency, campus dining, purchasing, waste management, and our climate action plan.
2. Programming and outreach – supporting our interns and students with research projects or independent studies, planning on-campus events such as special lectures and guest speakers, and managing campus communications, our website, and social media presence.
3. Policy and big picture – managing the strategic direction for Vassar’s sustainability efforts, ensuring we’re focused on the big issues like our energy master plan, determining the interim steps to reach our 2030 carbon neutrality goal, incorporating green building practices into upcoming capital projects, and attending committee meetings. Lots of committee meetings.

I also am responsible for managing our Sustainability Tracking and Rating System (STARS) rating with the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE).  It’s a rating system for higher education and covers all aspects of college operations, academics, and policies.  It’s the primary framework we use to keep organized and to benchmark ourselves against our peers.  We have to submit a report every three years to remain current.

In addition, I manage our partnership with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) Climate Corps fellowship program. We’ve hosted fellows for the last five years and have done projects in energy efficiency, renewable energy, carbon tax research, green building standards for capital projects, and the adoption of our climate action plan which included long term goal setting for embedding sustainability into our organizational culture.

What are some of the key skills for success in this role?

It’s important to be willing to learn on the go and to roll with the punches.  By that I mean you’ll never have enough time to become an expert on every subject, so you need to learn when enough is enough to be able to answer common questions and pitch an idea.  You also never know what’s going to come up and you need to be able to take it all in stride.  Never let perfect be the enemy of the good, it’s better to do something imperfectly than to be paralyzed by analysis.  So much of our field is learning by experimentation, we need to just give it a shot and if it doesn’t go perfectly we can make iterative improvements.

My role hasn’t required any special certifications.  Given that the field is so young I think there’s a danger of over-credentializing it.  This space is really about looking at projects holistically and interdisciplinarily and diverse people come to it for different reasons and that’s why it’s successful.  Don’t let a certification limit what you can or can’t be qualified to do.  That said, one particular area that I’ve had to learn about specifically is greenhouse gas accounting, it’s a formalized approach that you need to follow accurately.  You can go to ghgprotocol.org and get everything you need there.

What is your favorite part of your job?

Working with undergraduate students, they’re a ton of fun.  I have a team of nine student employees and several others that are doing projects on campus.  If I’m having a tough day, attending a student meeting just turns that around, they’re all so full of ideas and great energy.

What is the hardest part of your job?

There is always going to be a to-do list, and you’ll never stop re-balancing priorities and deciding what projects to work on.  Also, nothing in this space happens instantaneously, you can have a great idea, but the implementation hours often add up quickly.  You also have to be what one of my mentors calls a “practical radical” meaning balancing your sustainability goals with the political realities of your organization, and learning when to push appropriately, and when to pull.  You never know what relationships a future project will require.

What is your proudest professional achievement?

My team and I wrote a white paper on implementing internal carbon taxes in a small liberal arts college setting.  Yale has been a real leader in pioneering the idea of the social cost of carbon and even implemented an internal carbon tax, but most of their research has focused on large organizations such as Yale or Disney.  We wanted to take that research and see what it would look like if we applied it in a smaller setting.  Our work resulted in the development of an active coalition of colleges interested in carbon pricing and the work has been well received and cited several times.  Swarthmore is implementing a version of it, which is really exciting.

What was your path to this role?

I graduated from Vassar as an urban studies major, then went into a one-year program called GreenCorps, which is essentially an environmental advocacy boot camp.  I picked up some great skills but it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.  As that was wrapping up, one of my advisors reached out to let me know that Vassar had created an entry level contractor position in sustainability.  Previous work in this area had been managed by faculty and they were ready to create some continuity for the program.  Ultimately, I was able to make the case that it should be a full-time position with a broader scope.

I’m currently working on earning my MBA in Sustainability from Bard, I’ll be finished in May.  As part of that I spent a summer as an EDF Climate Corps fellow with PCC Markets in Seattle.  It was wonderful for me because I’ve been mostly self-taught with a lot of on the job learning and I got to learn firsthand from organizations and professionals who have been in the field much longer than I.  It was great to get experience working in a for-profit setting and work with metrics like sales, store traffic, and other things that don’t apply in the higher ed space.

What’s your advice to someone interested in a role like this?

Any job can be a sustainability job even if sustainability isn’t in the job title or description.  There’s always potential in roles like marketing, supply chain, or operations – you can always apply a sustainability lens to what you do.  Sustainability skills are something you can learn on the job and apply and leverage them to whatever you’re already working on.

Given how young and small this field is, I’ve found everyone is super friendly and eager to mentor and support people looking to get into the space.  We recognize there’s a lot of work to be done and many of my students have had good success reaching out to people through LinkedIn and email just asking for 20 minutes of time to chat.

What are your favorite resources?

I read Greenbiz.com regularly.  The Bard MBA has a podcast called The Impact Report – it comes out every other Friday.  There are some really good interviews with sustainability leaders and practitioners, and all the interviews are done by students.  I also listen to How I built This on NPR, it’s got great stories of startup founders and how they built the major brands we all know.  AASHE has a weekly newsletter with the news of what colleges are doing in sustainability, and I attend their annual conference.  Vassar is also a member of the Hudson Valley Coalition and the North East Coalition which are coalitions of other small liberal arts schools in sustainability.  The North East Sustainability Consortium (NESC) has a great annual conference for New England schools.

Who (or what) is your sustainability hero?  

E.F. Schumacher, author of Small is Beautiful.  His book speaks to his experiences working for the British coal industry in India and other areas.  It’s his treatise on how human level relationships are vital to solving global challenges such as the climate crisis, overpopulation, and resource management.

I also love Janine Benyes’s work at the Biomimicry Institute, and Vandana Shiva, a feminist food activist from India who has been writing on global food issues for decades.  Very inspiring.

As for companies, Lego, Ikea, and PCC Markets in Seattle.  They all have leadership which includes big audacious goals, they are pursuing them in creative ways, they’re wholistic, and they go about their work with a sense of fun and spirit which I admire.