Guest Post: Students for Sustainability

The Austin Dish Lending Library isn’t just for Austin! On November 8, 2019 the Austin Dish Lending Library will hit the road and provide dishware for the Fall Fashion Show at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio. The Students for Sustainability Club is putting on the the Fall Fashion Show, which features recycled clothing.
Here is a guest blog post by Students for Sustainability Club member, Danielle Ojeda. If you don’t think that a few people can make a huge difference, just check out what this club has been able to accomplish!

Students for Sustainability Club at OLLU

Since 1895, Our Lady of the Lake Univeristy (OLLU) has established a foundation that has defined community as a core value to our congregation, students, and faculty. Following OLLU's traditions of supporting and advocating to continuously improve San Antonio's west side community, the Students for 

Sustainability focuses to encourage a more environmental lifestyle beyond our university campus. There has not been a more prominent time for students to make noise about the future our oceans, forests, and arctic land masses are headed in - due to plastic pollution and climate change. However, as individuals become more aware of these environmental statistics, the inspiration to act and make a difference grows stronger. As of spring 2018, the Students for Sustainability is the only organization on campus that is fully dedicated to highlighting greener ways everybody can pursue. 

You do not need the latest technological innovations to help save the earth.  With a strong passion and drive to decrease our carbon footprint, change is possible, and every member of the Students for Sustainbility Club is proof of that. By thinking globally and acting locally, we have established a new attitude, traditions, and values, towards a more environmentally sustainable univeristy. Effectively, from our efforts to showcase ways college students can attribute outside of our organization, the sustainbility club is set to showcase the university's first ever Fall Fashion Show featuring recycled clothing in November 2019. In addition to this event our ambitions to increase student involvement continue through proposals brought forth to OLLU faculty. 
Campus initatives tha enhance this eco-friendly outlook include switching to reusable cups in the Sister Annie B. cafeteria, incourporating recycled printing paper at every computer lab on campus, and hosting a recycling campaign every semester to fill the gap of what can and can not be thrown in each bin.  ​​​

A club initiative-planting a tree on campus.

​Founders of the organization, Chrystyn Cavazos, Viridiana Mejia, and Kathy Garcia have addressed the timeliness of rooting OLLU more deeply towards sustainability to the university's interior audience on Provost Professional development day. Amongst every department's faculty was Dean of Business and Leadership, Dr. Bruce Rosenthal, a figure whom supports and assists the organization's purpose, as well as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at OLLU, Dr. Lourdes Maria Alvarez. Upon clarify the change that students wish to see at OLLU, goals put into action included planting an herb garden on campus, and emplimenting green reusable containers in the cafeteria for the OLLU community. 
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For a campus that is known to many as "the jewel of the west side", the sustainability club works towards preserving our ecosystem, so OLLU may uphold to the example for the community that surrounds us.

- Danielle Ojeda