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The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Friday, March 29, 2024

Rebranded student environmental group looks to redefine its direction

Bianca-Hutner-1
Tufts Climate Action member, junior Bianca Hutner, poses for a portrait in Tisch Library on March 7.

The student environmental group on campus formerly known as the Tufts Sustainability Collective (TSC) has changed its name to Students for Environmental Awareness (SEA). The change comes after a decline in involvement, and the group hopes to inspire new membership by clarifying the organization’s purpose, refreshing its message and allowing its branch groups to operate with more independence, SEA directors noted.

No longer under TSC, environmentally-focused groups will apply to become their own independent clubs and will now set their own budgets and manage their own schedules, according to Bianca Hutner, head of Tufts Climate Action (TCA), which used to be a TSC branch.

Hutner, a junior, is excited about the transition and believes it will be logistically easier to manage TCA as an independent organization.

“The groups were not actually that related. Logistically now this makes more sense," Hutner said. "In theory, having a group that is meant to foster collaboration is a good idea, but [TCA's] personal goals don’t overlap with other groups."

SEA Co-Director Alexa Bishopric said that previously, TSC acted as an umbrella organization and a facilitator, allowing students with an idea for a group to form a branch under TSC without having to go through the formal process of creating a club. Bishopric, a first-year, explained that students could remain in TSC for whatever period of time was necessary to focus on a particular project.

This structure caused confusion when advertising to the student body, Director of Sustainability Tina Woolston said, recalling that it was sometimes difficult to define the group’s purpose.

“The directors of TSC always felt like they didn’t know how to explain what TSC was and how to get people to come to the TSC meetings,” Woolston said.

According to first-year Aberdeen Bird, SEA's other co-director, the structure of TSC was not promoting the goals that the group had in mind, and it had become idle.

“It wasn’t activities based, it was more for discussion. And that doesn’t encourage people to come back if they don’t have something that they will be doing to focus on,” Bird said.

Bishopric added that the group was not acting as a structure to connect different environmental groups on campus. As groups became more distinct, there was less of a need for the facilitator role TSC previously maintained, Bishopric said.

“The original purpose of the club was not being fulfilled, and members of the other clubs were not coming to our meetings," Bishopric said. "We weren’t acting as a group to bring people together. It was more individual, and membership started to decrease."

With its new title, SEA wants to become a more all-encompassing option for students looking to be involved with environmental awareness at Tufts, according to Bird and Bishopric. The two co-directors hope that this will attract more people to join and become active members.

Defining the new direction the club hopes to go in with its new structure, Bishopric said, “We want to be a broad environmental group on campus that can fulfill a lot of different interests: an eclectic environmental group to promote sustainability on campus, to promote awareness on campus and to be a space where people who are environmentally minded can engage with that."

Now that the branches are separating, the Office of Sustainability at Tufts will play the role of a facilitator between the groups to ensure there is continued collaboration, Woolston said.

“Our office is going to try to organize a meeting a semester and bring the students together to talk,” Woolston said. “We are most concerned about making sure organizations know what other organizations are doing so they’re not duplicating projects.”

The co-directors of the rebranded SEA agreed that there will still be discussion between the independent groups despite the new independence.

“We want to have a kind of sustainability roundtable, where all of these clubs meet twice a semester and talk about what we are doing so that we can collaborate more, because it seems that a lot of us have similar goals and we don’t want to overlap, and if we do overlap it would be better to work together,” Bird said.

Organizations cannot apply to be official clubs in the spring, so this semester will act as a transition period for the groups to continue clarifying their goals and their roles, Bird said. She mentioned a transition to broader goals and more discussion based on members’ interest.

“It is better right now for us to keep our goals open to what the members want,” Bird said.