A champion of sustainability is leaving UW-Milwaukee. Kate Nelson has served as the university's director of sustainability since the office was created in 2008. She's now headed to the University of Minnesota to lead its Twin Cities campus sustainability efforts.
As UWM director of sustainability, Nelson’s work ranged from creating top to bottom energy efficient buildings throughout campus, to engaging an array of faculty, staff and students in why truly operating sustainably matters.
READ: UW-Milwaukee Experiments With "Greener" Grass
You have only to walk into her third floor office on campus to see how central students are to Nelson’s work. “ So we are looking at two sheets of microgreens, this is a great example,” she says.
Nelson calls the microgreens a dense piece of nutrition a student wanted to explore. “He’s actually going into the medical field; nutrition’s really important to him. He was part of our student supporting agriculture program this summer learning the ways of gardening, and food sovereignty and canning and he wanted to keep going with that,” Nelson explains
That meant figuring out how to grow microgreens in the most efficient way “What’s the best way to water them, give them light — all those scientific things,” she says. And, as importantly, how to get them to people who might not otherwise has access to them
Nelson says the student, named Alex, has been delivering them to UWM’s food pantry. ”So he’s been packaging them up and cutting them at the food pantry to show people where they come from and giving them away. And he’s going to continue it next semester before he goes off to medical school."
Nelson looks at every initiative launched during her tenure and sees students who made them happen. The unwanted furniture and equipment UWM reuses, sells or donates, students have helped to drive that program. Others oversaw the construction of a massive stormwater project.
”When students have an idea, they want to learn something and they want to enhance what our office is doing, we sit down and figure out what that looks like. We create it together.” Nelson adds, “It really is out of their initiative and what problem they want to solve.”
Nelson says the creation of UWM’s Office of Sustainability itself was student-driven. She imagined the possibility when she returned to school after a brief career acting, directing and managing productions at a local theater company.
“I was adjusting my own life and looking for a career out there where I could be passionate and yet logical,” Nelson recalls.
As she earned a degree in conservation and environmental science, Nelson began talking with fellow students about the need for environmental policy at UWM. “That kind of inspired me and I was really hearing the students’ voice matters. And we wrote a letter collectively to our leadership here at UWM,” she recalls.
The stars aligned. “I graduated at the end of 2007 with my second bachelor’s degree and by January 7 of 2008 I was, at that time, the environmental sustainability coordinator,” Nelson says. That was 15 years ago, almost to the date.
UWM is now embarking on its most ambitious environmental goal — to achieve a carbon neutral campus by 2050.
Nelson says part of the puzzle is driving down the impacts of commuting; not an easy task for a commuter-heavy faculty and student body. Yet, Nelson describes the challenge as fun.
”We have such good research and now we’re in the nitty gritty of really figuring it out, what we have to do for the engineering of the program. It’s back to those five Es — education, encouragement, evaluation, and enforcement and so that’s how we evaluate and really get serious about these ideas,” she says.
Nelson is speaking in the present tense, although she won’t be here for UWM’s next chapter in sustainability. But she is confident others will carry on the calling she felt all those years ago.
“Centering on what I call a sustainable student. That they are mentally, physically, financially well — within a sustainable campus, within a sustainable city. So I call it the nested model. It centers you around student need and being of value to students and not some lofty goals that have no connection to what the students and the rest of the campus community need,” she explains.
Nelson says she’s very happy to pass the baton.
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