Structure
Overview
STEP is a group of peer-to-peer educators who seek to maximize student engagement by focusing their environmental efforts on their residential college communities. STEP coordinators, paid through the financial savings their efforts generate, report to the Yale Office of Sustainability.
Structure
STEP is composed of two student co-directors, three team heads, and twenty-four college coordinators, two for each of the twelve residential colleges. Coordinators are the point people in their college for sustainability-related questions about heating, recycling, food waste, safe disposal of electronics, and more.
Every coordinator is also a member of one of three teams: Waste, Energy, or Community. The teams' purpose is to conceive of, develop, and implement each semester's educational campaigns for their respective focuses.
Two co-directors work to maintain the smooth functioning of STEP as a whole, while constantly looking for new directions in which STEP can develop and improve. The directors provide a vision for the organization as a whole and foster a sense of shared purpose among all 24 coordinators and 3 team heads. The directors also communicate with other campus environmental groups at Yale and keep a finger on the pulse of environmental activism on other college campuses.
Communication
In order to facilitate the development of a sustainable college community at Yale, STEP has developed relationships and maintained contact with Yale's custodial supervisors, dining hall managers, energy manager, recycling coordinator, residential college masters, and of course the student body.
STEP coordinators are an active presence in their residential college communities. They attend weekly college council meetings, where they are available to address environmental concerns that arise in plannign college events, and where they deliver weekly updates about STEP's activities. In addition, coordinators send out brief weekly emails to their colleges; these emails typically announce events and offer information about recycling, CFLs, and unplugging appliances over breaks. Coordinators also create opportunities to interact face-to-face with students by hosting study breaks and informal “office hours.”
STEP's success depends on constant internal communication on a number of levels. In our weekly organization-wide meetings, the topics of discussion range from college and team updates to strategies for effective engagement with our peers. Team heads and directors also meet on a weekly basis to update one another on the teams' progress, to discuss and work through leadership challenges, and to offer one another suggestions and new ideas. Finally, teams meet individually once a week to brainstorm, hammer out logistics of campaigns and events, and keep one another informed as to individual progress on team projects.