The Biannual Campus and Community Sustainable Communities Collaborative Expo is set to be hosted next week on April 27 at 3 Dots Downtown in State College from 5 to 7 p.m. Registration is not required and light refreshments will be provided.
Each semester, the Sustainable Communities Collaborative (SCC) connects Penn State classes with community partners across Pennsylvania to engage with practical, real-world projects and research that increase the community’s capacity to make educated decisions that move them towards a more sustainable future. Student work represents most colleges and disciplines and is framed by the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals. Projects include senior capstones, research, design, and ideation in response to community needs from across the commonwealth.
The expo is co-sponsored by the Borough of State College who has been the premier SCC partner with SCC since its inception almost a decade ago. In addition to accomplishing more than 80 successful projects, the relationship has opened additional research opportunities within the borough as well as ongoing projects and relationships which work to advance the borough’s sustainability plan and vision.
At the event, remarks will be given by Paul Shrivastava, chief sustainability officer and director of the Sustainability Institute at Penn State; Tom Fountaine, State College Borough manager; and John Dawes, executive director of the Foundation for Pennsylvania Watersheds.
This year, the expo highlights projects addressing stormwater mitigation, sustainability-focused communications, solar adaptations, transportation, graphic design, sustainability in the workplace and more. Student work will be presented in a poster format, and students and faculty will encourage informal conversations about their projects and experience in this celebratory setting.
“The Sustainable Communities Collaborative continues to provide my public relations campaigns class with meaningful projects," said Tara Wycoff, assistant teaching professor at Penn State. "I’m glad the expo is back in person. Nothing compares to the experience my students get presenting to community and University stakeholders face-to-face. As they prepare to present how they used research to solve a community communications problem, the students are challenged to convey a semester’s worth of work in a concise and memorable way,”
The 2022 Spring SCC Expo features projects that connect student work to communities, empowering rising professionals to make concrete, positive impacts within their work. The project showcase also exemplifies and promotes sustainable economic development to surrounding communities.
“There have been several highly successful projects resulting from our partnership with the SCC," said Joanne Tosti-Vasey, Bellefonte Borough Council member. "The first was a design to improve our compost facility. The students who worked on this project did such an excellent job that we were able to submit their design and proposal to the Department of Environmental Protection and received a quarter-million-dollar plus grant to improve the site.
“The second was an initial review and proposal to both remove the dam at Talleyrand Park and to deal with the erosion of the peninsula in the park between Spring Creek and the Big Spring Outflow. We submitted the erosion portion of their proposal to Bright Cities in the summer of 2021. After we received the grant, we began planting bushes, native plants, and trees along the peninsula and throughout town,” continued Tosti-Vasey.