Tcu sfsf paper

Katrine Reddin Eduardo Madaria Justin Benedict TCU Students for a Sustainable Future: Project Frog Farm TCU Students for a Sustainable Future (TCU SFSF) is one of Texas Christian University’s largest organizations that empowers students and the Fort Worth community to work towards a sustainable future through education, research, development, and implementation. What sets TCU SFSF apart from many other organizations is that we strongly supports the full integration of TCU students, faculty, alumni, and the Forth Worth community because we believe that in order to accomplish sustainability, the entire community needs be involved in a mutual effort. Our mission statement is “Our mission is to educate the TCU and Fort Worth community on sustainability through the hands-on experience of a campus-run farm while promoting leadership, environmental awareness, and agricultural sustainability”. As an organization, we hope to accomplish many different goals that will lead to the education and implementation of sustainability, mainly through sustainable agriculture, both on and off campus in the Fort Worth area. TCU SFSF’s main goal and current priority project is garnering support for and eventually building TCU’s very own sustainable farm that will be known as Frog Farm. Project Frog Farm is an effort to construct and maintain a sustainable 1-acre farm where students will receive course credit through the Ranch Management program to study plants, insects, agriculture, and sustainable farming methods. The farm will also hold demonstrations and be open to the public. All food grown on the farm will be given to TCU campus dining, providing safe, GMO-free, organic cuisine for the TCU student body.

The creation of Project Frog Farm is a direct response to the concerns of the TCU and Fort Worth community with regards to dangerous and potentially lifethreatening environmental issues. In 2014, the Dallas-Fort Worth area was ranked number 8 on the American Lung Association’s out-today air-quality report for “unhealthiest air to breathe in America” (Wilonsky). Naturally, students and faculty

at TCU and residents of Fort Worth are concerned with air levels reaching dangerously unhealthy heights due to particle pollution intake (Wilonsky). TCU’s carbon footprint is abnormally high for a medium sized university because of the extensive use of cars on campus since students of any year are allowed to have a car permit. There is also a lack of public transportation in the surrounding Fort Worth area that further contributes to carbon dioxide emissions. Implementing the Frog Farm is expected to offset TCU’s carbon footprint by 25%, a step closer to turning TCU into a carbon sink rather than a carbon source. Frog Farm will decrease TCU’s need for transportation and shipment of food products from distant locations, which will decrease CO2 emissions from the trucks the school currently uses. The Frog Farm will only use sustainable practices, such as the use of manure as a natural fertilizer, having composts, avoiding traffic on wet soils, and maintaining soul cover with plants and mulches. One of the main components of sustainable agriculture is creating “healthy soil” (Do Something.Org). The Frog Farm will use methods to enhance and protect the productivity of the soil. The farm will also develop efficient, biological systems that don’t need high levels of material inputs like harmful chemicals and processes that output large quantities of pollution (Do Something.Org). In addition, the food produced from Frog Farm will be completely organic and GMO-free, and it will be served in the varying food services at TCU. This ensures that students will be eating freshly grown and healthy food products that are free of pesticides and other chemicals. In short, by creating a sustainable agricultural farm on campus, TCU and the Fort Worth community will be producing food and other plant products while using techniques that protect the environment, public health, human community, and animal welfare.

Although TCU SFSF is already a relatively large organization with regards to membership, we have put in place many plans of outreach in order to gain a larger membership and financial support base. We decided to take advantage of social media since it presently plays such a dominant role in communication and outreach, and created a Facebook page (www.facebook.com/TCUsustainablefuture), a Twitter account (@TCU_SFSF), and an Instagram account (TCU_SFSF). According

to Carlos Monteiro of AdWeek, a weekly American advertising trade publication, the varying social medias cater to different age groups and constituents, which is why we decided to take advantage of all of them in order to reach every age group instead of just one. Both Facebook and Twitter are similar in that their majority users are the 25-34 age group, so both of our accounts on those social medias were directed towards attracting intellectual personnel from that age category (Monteiro). On our Facebook page we incorporated a lot of visuals to interest users to click on the page. We wrote some posts about what the organization was and then some on sustainable agriculture information and statistics. Facebook is also a great avenue for communication with our followers because if they have a question or concern but don’t want anyone to see it, they can simply send our organization a message by “inboxing” us. Our Twitter account shared similar information as our Facebook account, since we used facts, statistics, and some visuals to attract followers. The audience on Twitter tends to be more about short, concise sentences since there is a limited character number use, so we had to be creative in figuring out what to say in such a short amount of space. Our goal was to get our followers to share or “retweet” our posts to reach their audiences as well so we tried to share really interesting facts. According to AdWeek, Instagram caters to a slightly younger audience than Facebook and Twitter, and since Instagram’s main focus is the sharing of pictures, we made sure to make our posts to be visually pleasing with short captions. We added some hash-tags in the captions of the pictures because that linked our picture to those words and allowed for the entire Instagram community to find us. However, social media was not our only avenue into gaining more followers and members. We decided that each year we would have a table at the TCU Club Fair where students could sign the petition for Project Frog Farm or sign up to join the organization. Because we really want to encourage student, faculty, and Fort Worth resident involvement, we also have free seminars open to the public that educate the audience on sustainable agriculture and informing them exactly what’s in store for the implementation of Project Frog Farm.

In order to successfully implement Project Frog Farm, TCU SFSF requires a certain amount of funding, and in order to reach our goal of $300,000 for the initial certification to build the farm, we have taken multiple steps towards reaching that number. Our main source of funding will come from sponsors like Food Alliance, an organization that supports farms and companies that practice sustainability in food and agriculture, and alumni of the Ranch Management School, since we hope the farm can eventually become a part of the curriculum. Twice a year we plan to hold a black tie fundraiser in which TUC alumni, potential sponsors, and local residents (Like Edward Bass) may attend to socialize, learn about the cause, and hopefully write a bunch of tremendously generous checks. We are also hoping that TCU’s board of education will approve the farm for becoming apart of the Ranch Management program, so that we can also receive funding from student tuitions.

Student member involvement in finding funding is highly encouraged, and members will also be responsible for running smaller student-run fundraisers outside of the BLUU and in the commons. Our final method of funding is the profit made from selling our “Swag� items, which are TCU SFSF T-Shirts. They can be purchased online on our website and will also be sold in the Commons by members to passing students. We chose to use T-shirts as our swag item because we know that TCU fashion generally consists of students wearing T-shirts to class, and also that the TShirts will act as free advertising, since our logo and name is on all of them.

Website: Our main goal with the creation of our website was to make it simple and easy to navigate. We also wanted to make it aesthetically pleasing, which is why we incorporated a lot of images and logos.

Sources: “11 Facts About Sustainable Agriculture.” 11 Facts About Sustainable Agriculture. Do Something.Org, 20 May. 2014. Web. 02 May. 2015.

Wilonsky, Robert. “Hold Your Breath, Because Dallas-Fort Worth’s Air Is Some of the Unhealthiest in the Country.” The Scoop Blog. The Dallas Morning News, 30 Apr. 2014. Web. 02 May. 2015.

Monteiro, Carlos. “Infographic: Who’s Really Using Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr and Instagram in 2015.” Advertising and Branding. AdWeek, 12 Jan. 2015. Web. 02 May. 2015.