Wow, how time flies! I only recently realized that it has been 7 months since I left Portland State University to start working for the City of Portland! Suffice it to say, that's embarrassing, but these last several months have been action-packed with creating new programs that address housing affordability issues and I've also been busy in my MBA program.
I'll admit, I was surprised to realize that I haven't posted anything in these past 7 months, but I did want to dust off the blog to share that I am proud to know my previous work at Portland State still pays dividends. First and foremost, PSU was recently named one of the nation’s Top 10 Most Innovative Universities by U.S. News & World Report - the the third year it garnered that honor, putting it in the company of such universities as Stanford, Harvard, Duke and MIT.
One of the reasons that PSU was named as one of the nation's Top 10 Most Innovative Universities was for the sustainability-oriented partnerships fostered out of the Institute for Sustainable Solutions (ISS). When I worked at ISS, I not only had the pleasure of pioneering the university's largest community-partnership program focused on sustainability, but I was also was lucky enough to share insights from our experimentation with others through scholarly articles and the book series that I co-authored and co-edited, Sustainable Solutions.
The first volume of our book series, Sustainable Solutions: Let Knowledge Serve the City, told the story about Portland State's journey toward becoming a national leader in sustainability, and the book garnered a favorable review in the August 2017 issue of Sustainability: The Journal of Record. The project was truly a labor of love, and was born out of the realization that PSU faculty and staff did great work but often failed to share lessons learned with others. So in our book series, we embarked on the task on share our successes and challenges, hoping they could provide insight that would help other universities accelerate their sustainability teaching, research, and community engagement.
Fortunately, others found our stories worthwhile. In their review, Sustainability: The Journal of Record notes that:
Universities seem to be ideal places to seed important sustainability ideas and practices. Due to their unique position to foster sustainability research, education, and innovation, universities can influence not only faculty and students, but also society at large. Some institutions have been more influential than others because of their mission, funding, or leadership. What is inspiring is when an institution like Portland State University (PSU) employs intellectual, social, relational, financial, and physical resources to embed sustainability into its mission, operations, research, curricula, and community outreach. In this book, we learn how PSU came to do just that and live its motto: Let Knowledge Serve the City.
They continue:
My past experience as a faculty member teaching and researching sustainability reporting topics and conducting community-university sustainability collaborations made me eager to read this book. I was not disappointed and strongly recommend it to all university administrators and faculty looking to create similar sustainability programs or to improve existing ones.
It is exciting to see our work recognized, and I again want to thank my co-editors, Drs. B.D. Wortham-Galvin and Jennifer Allen. s we note in our thanks, Genevieve Hudson helped us stay organized and pull everything together, and we couldn't have executed this project without her. Additionally, congrats to of our contributors who did the hard work, reflected on what they learned along the way, and then worked with the editorial team to tell the story in the two volume series. To read Sustainability: The Journal of Record's complete review, click here.
I also had the pleasure of having my work at PSU recognized by the Business Officer Magazine for the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO). The July-August 2017 issue, titled "Immersion Excursion," highlights PSU's Living Lab program, discussing how our program bridges operations and academics to engage students in tangible learning initiatives that also yield campus improvements. The program was born from the insight that the university had ambitious sustainability goals that it could not achieve on its own, and that many students craved real-world problem-solving opportunities as part of their academic experience. Those two opportunities laid the foundation for a great program, and the article highlights some exciting student projects that I developed alongside our Campus Sustainability Manager, Jenny McNamara, including the Waste Audit Living Lab Experience (WALL-E) and the Campus Tree Inventory. To read read more about what Business Officer Magazine has to say about campus sustainability programs, click here.
Finally, I had the pleasure of working with Dr. Kevin Kecskes and some of his PhD students during my final hurrah at PSU to craft a thought-piece for the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning. Alongside Kevin, Jen, and Erin, we developed an article for the Future Directions Project, a special edition of this top-shelf journal that advances ideas about how the service learning and community engagement (SCLE) field can continue to innovate and grow. In our piece, we charge that colleges and universities can use sustainability to innovate and focus their community engagement and change-making, and recommend that they identify common ground and use collaborative frameworks to advance holistic sustainability. To read our open-access article at MJCSL, click here.
So, even thought it's been 7 months since I worked at Portland State, it's exciting to see that my work is still having an impact. Thanks for reading, and I hope to share more about my current work at the city and about insights from my MBA program soon.
- Jacob Sherman