YSEC

Welcome to the home of the Yale Student Environmental Coalition. YSEC is a non-profit, student-run group that has promoted environmental responsibility at Yale for more than 20 years. YSEC's principal goals include educating the Yale community about threats to our environment, networking with other related environmental groups, and advocating for responsible consumer choice, sustainable university policy, and environmental justice. We meet on Wednesdays from 8:00-9:00 in the Dwight Hall Library.

YSEC-wide meetings alternate between three formats: Project Review Meetings, in which members propose new project groups and discuss long-term projects; Environmental Discussion Meetings, in which members discuss a topic of environmental interest raised by a recent film or article; and Sustainable Leadership Development Meetings, in which YSEC members meet with members of other environmentally focused student groups to discuss plans that involve the entire Yale environmental activist community.

YSEC is composed of several short and long-term project groups that meet separately from our main meetings and focus on specific projects, such as Environmental Education in New Haven public schools, Sustainable Study Abroad, Bike Sharing in the residential colleges, Curbing bottled water use at Yale, and Environmental Political Action in New Haven and the US. If you have an idea for a new project group, we'd love to hear about it from you! In addition to specific project groups, YSEC works on a number of coalition-wide projects, including our plans for our College Environmental Activist Conference co-hosted with NextGEN in September, the 350.org Day of Climate Action in October, and the COP-15 UN Climate Conference in December.

Last year, we hosted an environmental bazaar at Dwight Hall, GreenFest (a fall festival promoting environmental awareness), regular lunches with distinguished Yale professors and guests including Forestry School Dean Gus Speth and US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a panel discussion on the environment and the presidential elections, Water Week (a week of lectures, panels and films related to the water crisis) and Earth Week (a week devoted to general environmental awareness around Earth Day). We also worked with YCC on two proposals, one to implement a bike-sharing program on campus and another to incorporate green design elements into the new residential colleges. YSEC also worked with the athletics department and an electrical engineering student, Henrique Rocha, to harness the energy from fitness equipment and promote energy efficiency with our Sustainable Fitness Project. The last three years YSEC published a small booklet, "Green Grads", which is given as a gift to the senior class to provide ways to live a sustainbable lifestyle after Yale. YSEC also has funding to send students to environmental conferences, and sent more than a dozen students to conferences across the world in the last year.

We welcome participation and new members at any point in the year. For more information about getting involved, or about YSEC generally, please contact:

Cornelia Twining: cornelia.twining@yale.edu
Matt Ramlow: matthew.ramlow@yale.edu
Rachel Shaffer: rachel.shaffer@yale.edu

YSEC members and attendees of the Environmental Leaders Conference giving the Blackstone Group and the U.S. legislators some stern messages. The first says "No New Coal" and the second says "350," which asks countres around the world to bring carbon concentrations back down to 350 ppm. Thanks to Rachel Payne and Claire Henly for organizing this!