Several months after five sustainability-related clubs joined together to create a single Green Coalition, the team has begun to get into their groove working together. Each of the five former clubs is organized as a subcommittee in the Green Coalition. With hard work from Green Coalition members, the Food Recovery Network is back up and running, Bike Share is continuing with shop hours and planning for the annual Trashion Show has begun.
“I think so far it has been really great,” Green Coalition Co-Secretary Lauren Buettner, ’28, said while reflecting on the year so far. “We’ve been able to take some past events from the other clubs that we absorbed as well as create our own events.”
FRN has recovered over 100 pounds of food waste this year, Buettner said, which was donated to nonprofits such as Crawford County Mental Health Awareness Program.
Green Coalition is also planning more activities to get students involved with the campus and the community around Allegheny.
“We’ve been working on a lot of different projects and we have been able to have a lot of fun events and activities so far,” Green Coalition Co-President Liam Shields, ’27, said. “Early in April we’ll be having our annual Trashion Show, which has been a tradition that I think green clubs have done every year for a long time, so that’s a big event that we’re looking forward to. Then, when the weather gets a little warmer, we’re interested in starting some more hands-on activities, like doing trash pickups. We have a highway that we have adopted — doing trash pickups on that, doing trash pickups on campus, maybe partnering with local organizations like French Creek Valley Conservancy for volunteer work for invasive species.”
The main goal of the Green Coalition is to keep each of the five former green clubs’ goals alive while bringing them together under one umbrella to provide more support to each other, according to Green Coalition Co-President Hannah Tomer, ’27.
“We had a lot of conversations at the end of last year with all of the participating clubs, just like figuring out basically how to combine them all into one constitution,” Tomer said. “We’re able to keep the missions of the clubs alive because most of the clubs, they were going to die out if we hadn’t merged them.”
Despite all that it has accomplished nearly one year into its existence, Green Coalition is still working on achieving its main goal for the organization.
“The way that we decided to make sure that these different groups get represented that has been a struggle or hasn’t been implemented yet is that we are doing a committee system where different students that are interested in different activities can become a committee, can start a committee with other students that are interested in the same activity and represent the rule of those functions of those clubs under the one banner of Green Co so that we have enough participants for major events,” Shields said. “We haven’t implemented the committees yet. We are still working towards that in making sure we have enough participants for things and making sure we have the organization and the student interest in leading different activities. So that has been the biggest struggle so far; the main idea of implementing committees hasn’t been accomplished yet, but we are working towards it and looking forward to it.”
