History

Our Beginnings

STEP's beginnings date back to 1990. In that year, the Simpsons premiered, Germany reuinified, and the Yale Student Environmental Coalition, Yale Recycling, and Yale Facilities joined forces to create the Green Cup. The Green Cup was an inter-collegiate competition that promoted recycling and the reduction of heat, electricity, and water usage.

The competition between residential colleges continued for ten years. Because recycling rates were much easier to measure than heat, electricity, and water use, the competition came to focus increasingly on recycling rates. Each week, a committed corps of Recycling Department student employees inspected the recycling and trash bins in college entryways. Colleges earned points for well-sorted recycling and trash and lost points for mixed-up trash and recycling. The students behind the Green Cup not only measured recycling rates, but also educated their peers about recycling, energy consumption, and water use.

Despite the enthusiasm and dedication of a small number of students, recycling rates at Yale remained stagnant through the 1990s. The Recycling Department surveyed students to try and understand why rates weren't improving. Many students said that the competition format was not enough to spur them to change their daily habits. When asked what would be sufficient incentive, many replied that they would recycle if it were more convenient to do so. Provided with this information, the recycling office and its student workers retooled and struck out in search of a new model of student engagement.

Enter Maren Haus. Haus, a tennis coach at Yale, signed on as a supervisor to the students working on the Green Cup. Having worked with the Resource Efficiency Program at Harvard, Haus proposed to apply REP's model, which focused on engaging students in a wide range of campus sustainability initiatives, to Yale's programming. In 2004, she oversaw the transition from Green Cup to STEP. Like Green Cup, in its first few years STEP reported to the Recycling Office. In 2006 STEP began reporting to the newly-formed Office of Sustainability. STEP currently works with the guidance and support of the entire office staff, and especially the Education and Outreach Manager.

STEP coordinators work within their colleges to promote a culture of sustainability. Over the past several years we have conducted a number of campaigns focusing on issues from electricity use to food waste. Rather than pursuing an agenda completely of its own making, STEP collaborates with the Office of Sustainability, facilities, dining services, college masters, and, most importantly, students, to promote sustainable practices that everyone can support.

As a relatively young organization, one of STEP's major projects this year is to establish a consistent and efficient system for basic operations. For example, we have recently launched a website for internal use, which facilitates efficient communication and the development of institutional memory. The website features a calendar, contact information for all the coordinators, a forum for discussion among coordinators, and spaces for directors to post checklists of weekly tasks, educational resources, past and current campaign posters, and photos. Our hope is to lay a solid organizational foundation on top of which we will be able to build an increasingly creative system of engagement with our peers.

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