Howdy Green Thinkers! Multi-level environmental health promotion in a nursing school

Staff, faculty, and students at a state university nursing school initiated a “Green Team” in Fall 2006, inspired by other staff/student-run campus environmental health organizations. The team's mission is to reduce the nursing school's environmental footprint and promote environmental stewardship at local and planetary levels. Key early successes were: initiating aluminum and plastic recycling and boosting paper recycling; encouraging energy conservation within the school, especially during low-occupancy semester breaks; organization of a cleaning of the creek adjacent to the building yielding 17 bags of solid waste and 2 bags of recyclables; launch of an information web page on the school's website; multiple screenings of a documentary on health effects of coal-burning power plants; shaping school culture by integrating Green Team projects into academic assignments; and conducting a Green Team visibility campaign. Key to the Green Team's early successes were: a flexible organizational and logistical process; buy-in from administrative heads at school and university levels; taking advantage of existing infrastructural support for environmental health; community-building among all levels of the school population; close tie-in of the team's pro-health and pro-environmental messages with the school's discipline, nursing; and emphasis on environmental health promotion as a multi-layered personal, interpersonal, and ecological health promotion intervention. Next steps involve analyzing ways to evaluate the team's impact, sustain team cohesiveness and readiness for action, and advance policies to promote environmental health within the school and the larger university campus.