Some of the world’s leading sustainability practitioners are coming to campus next semester. They will be teaching students as part of a new course, Practicum in Innovative Sustainability Leadership (SUMA K4310), in the M.S. in Sustainability Management program. The course will cover a range of sustainability issues—from urban sustainability to green products—but it will center on the strategies that sustainability managers use to integrate environmental concerns in the operations of their organizations.
“We want students to learn how practitioners make sustainability strategic—what it really takes to change organizations so that improving environmental performance becomes an essential part of what they do,” says George Sarrinikolaou, who is co-teaching the course with Professor Steve Cohen.
The practitioners who are scheduled to participate in the course include both pioneers of the field, such Steve Nicholas, the former sustainability director of the City of Seattle, and Jonathan Rose, a real estate developer and a champion of green building; the next generation of urban sustainability practitioners, such as Katherine Gajewski, the sustainability director for the City of Philadelphia, and Susanne DesRoches of the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey; and leaders in corporate sustainability, such as Vance Merolla of Colgate-Palmolive and Al Iannauzzi of Johnson & Johnson.
Each class meeting will feature a guest speaker—13 of them in all—plus questions from students, during the first hour, and a discussion of the lecture in the second hour. The class will meet each Wednesday evening from 6:10 to 8 p.m. Weekly reading and writing assignments will help students identify and understand a set of strategies for developing and financing sustainability initiatives, tracking their performance, and integrating them into the operations of public and private organizations.
“The course will offer a unique opportunity to engage so many leading practitioners, get their varied perspectives on what it takes to be successful, but ultimately walk away with a set of strategies that students can use on the job,” says Sarrinikolaou.
The course satisfies the program’s integrative sustainability management curriculum area requirement. Integrative courses give students an understanding of current sustainability practice by drawing from the sustainability management program’s areas of study: economics and quantitative analysis, physical dimensions of sustainability management, the public policy environment, and general and financial management.
To learn more about the course, you can view the syllabus here.
