The Revolving Green Fund: Creating a Culture

of Business Friendly Sustainability

Stetson has a history of pushing for sustainability on campus. The CUB roof and the Brown Hall roof have solar panels, and the energy savings they create are on display for everyone to see in the CUB. Stetson has committed to building in an energy efficient manner and has five buildings that are LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified, which means that they are healthy, efficient, carbon and cost-saving green buildings according to globally recognized standards. In fact, the Lynn Business Center was the first LEED certified building in the state of Florida. And yet, Stetson has also been criticized for failing to be sustainable. The Reporter even wrote a story about excessive plastic use at Stetson during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many student groups have been a part of the effort to improve Stetson’s environmental consciousness, including the environmental club, Hatter Harvest, and the Environmental Sustainability Fellows.

There’s a common misconception that business and the environment are at odds. But Stetson’s Environmental Sustainability Fellows have the hot take that environmentalism and business actually work well together.

Stetson’s Environmental Sustainability Fellows are a student-led organization with two faculty advisors, Dr. Tony Abbott, Professor of Environmental Science and Studies, and Kevin Winchell, Director of the Center for Community Engagement, and four students, Audrey Berlie ‘24, Jacob Robinson ‘24, Sugeeth Sathish ‘25, and Mackenzie Powers ‘25. The organization was started in 2014, and ever since has been the driving force behind many of Stetson’s environmental projects. Every year they do multiple projects from conducting an audit of Stetson’s total greenhouse gas emissions to improving energy efficiency on campus. In past years, the Fellows brought solar panels to the roof of the CUB, and this year, they have plans to expand what’s called the “chiller loop” system, which is essentially a unit of water that runs through campus and acts as air conditioning; it will save a good deal of money because it’s more efficient.

The funding for all these large projects comes from the Revolving Green Fund which is run by the Fellows. You may recently have come across an email from the Environmental Sustainability Fellows with a survey for the Revolving Green Fund. The purpose of the survey was to get student’s opinions about what sustainability projects they would like to see on campus. Berlie explains, “It’s important to us that if the funding for the Revolving Green Fund is coming from students, we want to know that they’re interested in investing in. We can see investing in smaller work [in the future], and community focused things. We’re trying to see what students are engaged in because it’s their money, and we want to do with it what they’re interested in, too. So that’s our reason for releasing the survey, and we do that once a year.”

Students contribute to the Revolving Green Fund every year despite not knowing. Five dollars of the student life fee you pay goes toward the fund. The Fellows then apply the money towards investments in energy efficiency on campus. Berlie explains how this works, “So we’ve invested in the passive solar panels up on top of the CUB, and we’re looking next at investing in a chiller loop. When you invest money in those things, you’re going to be saving money because you’re using less electricity, and you’re also generating less emissions because you’re using less electricity. We need to track not only our savings in carbon emissions, we also need to track our return on investment on the projects. Then, whatever savings were generated goes back to the Revolving Green Fund to reinvest in the more projects.”

While the Environmental Sustainability Fellows are the leaders on these projects and doing the work, they’re not allowed to simply run free with the money they manage. All their proposals must be approved by both the Student Government Association and the Environmental Working Group (EWG). The EWG is composed of students, faculty, and staff, who all work together to oversee the Revolving Green Fund and other projects on campus.

Since being established in 2017, “We’ve really been in an investment phase these first four years,” says Dr. Abbott. “Money starts coming back next year. I mean, after this chiller loop goes in, we start getting pretty significant returns on the investments.”

Berlie added, “For the return on investment of the solar panels, we’re estimating around $7,000 to $8,000 each year coming back into the Revolving Fund through that project.”

The Fellows emphasized that sustainability is a good investment. “The idea is to demonstrate that investments in efficiency and sustainability actually create significant returns through savings. And if we start thinking in those ways a little more intentionally, then we can capture those things. So this was a way of kind of getting the administration and the university into the habit of thinking of these things as returns and making it more visible to them. By tracking it, we can demonstrate how it works. They [the university] prefer economic arguments, rather than moral arguments,” continues Dr. Abbott.

For the fellows, business and sustainability go hand in hand. Berlie explains,

Because what would you rather be running: a university that has very high electricity bills or very low electricity bills? And so by implementing these energy efficiency projects that are in relation to sustainability and saving us on carbon emissions, we’re saving the university money.”

The Environmental Sustainability Fellows want to make students more aware of the work they’re doing and how students can get involved. Robinson says, “There are quite a few opportunities to get involved with environmental projects. I know a lot of what we do is looking at statistics and numbers, and that’s probably not everyone’s ballgame; some people like to get more hands on. Some people like to influence policy. There are opportunities for people to do that here. You can speak with us. We have projects. There’s the environmental club, which I know does cleanups frequently. And then in our survey, we asked what people are interested in doing so that way we can find the people who are doing those things on or off campus and kind of direct them in that direction.”

When talking with the Fellows, it’s easy to tell that they have an endless amount of ideas about improving Stetson’s sustainability practices. As a member of the Roland George Investments Program (RGIP), Sathish wants to bring in environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) into the RGIP program by requiring “investments to have an ESG score that is of liking before they can proceed with any investment…to make sure that it’s a sound business for all forms of life, including sustainability.” Sathish is also interested in the upper levels of Stetson’s financial management and wants to find out what Stetson’s $300 million endowment is invested in and where it’s invested in sustainability.

Robinson is working on a bicycle program where he hopes students can check out bicycles like library books in the future: “So we have started putting together some bicycles, and those come from the end of every semester, because students tend to just leave bicycles around campus and then don’t claim them, and public safety has been storing them underneath Sage. So we’re taking bicycles from that pool and trying to do some maintenance on them. Students can come in and they can borrow it for two weeks and then return it.”

The group is hoping to expand the Environmental Sustainability Fellows to have a full time Sustainability Coordinator.

Powers talks about what it’s like to be an Environmental Sustainability Fellow during her first year at Stetson: “I didn’t realize the scale of everything that we do until I sat down when I got here to incredible people who are so focused and just incredible at what they do. And honestly, getting thrown into it coming right into Stetson is a kick in the butt. Trying to learn from these guys and be as good as them is definitely a good motivator. I strive to be as awesome as these guys. I enjoy it because it really connects you to the school. I feel like I know way more than I should as a first year. I know way too many people. I love it.

For a team of just four students and two advisors, the environmental fellows make a bigger impact on campus than one could imagine. It’s pretty safe to say that they are proving that combining business and sustainability isn’t as hot a take as it seems.