Early bird registration ends on Friday, Feb. 22, for the Sustainable City Year (SCY) conference that will be held in Eugene and Portland April 9-12. The event is presented by the University of Oregon's Sustainable Cities Initiative.
The three-day conference is for university representatives and partners interested in establishing SCY programs at their home institutions.
The workshop will provide implementation techniques such as funding opportunities, project selection, administration buy-in and first-year successes and failures. There will be presentations by representatives of colleges and universities around the country that have applied the community-engagement model.
Because the Sustainable City Year Program (SCYP) uses existing university courses, it is scalable and replicable to higher education institutions of all types. Participants will leave the workshop with a detailed set of documents that can serve as a “starter kit” for creating a Sustainable City Year Program at their institution.
The conference goal is to modernize higher education across the country to give students what they desire and need while empowering institutions of higher learning to be catalysts in addressing some of society’s most pressing challenges.
The SCYP is an award-winning, innovative program that connects existing classes, faculty, and assignments across disciplines to real-world projects identified by a different city each academic year. The Oregon implementation includes up to 30 courses across 10 or more disciplines, engaging more than 500 students who give 60,000 hours of fresh thinking, community engagement, and ideas to help communities move forward with sustainability-oriented projects and policies.
The New York Times has called the program "perhaps the most comprehensive effort by a U.S. university to infuse sustainability into its curricula and community outreach."
The program has received numerous national and international recognitions during its four years in operation, and in 2012 the program founders Nico Larco and Marc Schlossberg were recognized as the top faculty innovators in sustainability education by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE).
Education writer Scott Driscoll noted in the February 2013 issue of Alaska Airlines magazine that “blurring the boundaries between the classroom and the real world (can better prepare) students for today’s or tomorrow’s workplace demands. One such effort is the Sustainable City Year Program (SCYP) at the University of Oregon in Eugene.”
Early bird registration for the conference ends Feb. 22, and offers a $365 price for the first guest and $295 for each additional guest from the same college or university. After Feb. 22, registration cost will rise to $465 for the first guest and $395 for each additional guest from the same college or university. All meals and transportation from Portland to Eugene are included in the fee.
The conference agenda can be downloaded here.
For more information, contact Jessica Bloomfield at sci@uoregon.edu or 541-346-3582.
- from UO's Sustainable Cities Initiative