Sustainable Dining Coordinator with Sodexo’s Education Division at Colgate University

Sodexo’s Education Division is pleased to announce a full­-time Sustainable Dining Coordinator at Colgate University. The coordinator will work to advance local and sustainable food purchasing and overall sustainability in dining services at Colgate. This is an exciting opportunity for a qualified candidate to contribute to the growing sustainable food movement in higher education.

The successful candidate will establish a new system for benchmarking and tracking current purchasing practices with the ultimate goal of increasing local, community­-based, and 3rd party certified food purchases. The coordinator will also help to establish short-­ and long­-term goals, complete annual reporting, and work closely with local food producers and campus community members (especially students) to raise awareness of the importance of local and sustainable food choices. The coordinator will also support Sodexo accounts at other Central New York college campuses within a 50-­mile radius of Colgate including Le Moyne College, Utica College, Mohawk Valley Community College, SUNY Institute of Technology in Utica, and SUNY Oneonta. Consequently, this position will require limited travel within Central New York.

Our ideal candidate will be:

• A self­-starter with stellar communication skills and the ability to effectively manage multiple priorities in a dynamic environment.
• Experienced in managing food service in an education environment.
• Able to work independently.
• Detail oriented and well-­organized.

Desired experience, skills, and abilities include:

• Three or more years of experience in local and sustainable food-­related issues.
• Administrative and program management experience.
• Solid interpersonal skills and the ability to work with a diverse group of people.
• The ability to accomplish results in designated time frames.
• Be comfortable working in a fast moving/changing environment and have the ability to handle multiple tasks simultaneously.
• Have the ability to effectively motivate students and community members to action.
• Ability to travel between schools as needed.

Please send your resume and one-­page cover letter to John Pumilio, Director of Sustainability at Colgate University (jpumilio@colgate.edu; 315­228­6487) no later than Monday, November 3.

Sodexo is the 22nd largest employer worldwide and prides itself with great work­-life balance opportunities. Sodexo is a stable company offering robust benefit packages for its employees. Come join an industry leader and be part of making everyday a better day with Sodexo!

Colgate University is a residential, liberal arts college with 2900 students located in the village of Hamilton in rural Central New York.

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The Colgate Community Garden Team and Green Thumbs are both hard at work preparing for the upcoming Open House at the garden on September 29th from 4:30-6:30 pm.  The new garden is located just south of the Colgate campus on 12B.

The Open House will feature several different activities, aimed for people of all ages:

—Guided tours of the garden

—Free food prepared with garden produce

—Free food catered from Royal India Grill

—Farm stand with garden produce for sale

—Musical performance featuring the Resos from 5:00-6:00pm

—Pumpkin decorating

—Rock painting

—Planting activity- take home a juice-box planters

Colgate vans will be available to transport students and other community members to the garden.  Vans will leave from and return to the Curtis Clock at 4:30pm, 5:30pm, and 6:30pm  Look for the van with a “GARDEN OPEN HOUSE” sign in the window.

We would like to give a special thank you to all administrators who put their time and effort into the relocation process.  We are also proud to report that this year we have harvested nearly 1500 pounds of vegetables. Make sure to keep an eye out for produce on sale at our farm stand in the COOP on Thursdays from 11:30-1:30, and we hope to see you at the Open House!

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Beth Roy, garden consultant, at eroy@colgate.edu.

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By Adam Berk ’15

If you were to ask the average Colgate student which aspects of campus contributed the most to our carbon footprint, you would probably receive a variety of answers: heating, electricity, water usage, and possibly even paper usage. Some, however, might tell you that transportation to and from Colgate is one of the largest greenhouse gas-emitting sources of the university—and they would be right. In fact, while the burning of fossil fuels for water and space heating has the largest impact, emissions from air travel closely trails behind, and with the inclusion those from commuting and ground travel, transportation as a whole is the largest producer of greenhouse gases at Colgate.

As one would expect, most of us need to travel—whether it be outside or inside of the village of Hamilton—so the question becomes: what can we do to abate our transportation emissions?

Biking is always a fun and healthy option for getting from place to place fuel-free, and if you don’t have your own bicycle, you can rent one for only $15 a month from our Green Bikes program! Or, if you’re fortunate enough to own an electric vehicle, you can bring it to campus and take advantage of our new EV charging station. For further trips, the Colgate Student Travel Agency provides discounts for daily bus trips to Utica and New York City, as well as a shuttle service to the Syracuse Airport during busy travel periods. You can, of course, also employ the several other options offered—taxis, zipcar rentals, and on-demand shuttles to name a few—by various offices and departments. And if none of these options appeal to you, you can always take advantage of the real-time ridesharing service provided by the New York State Department of Transportation.

Air travel, needless to say, is sometimes an unfortunate necessity, but recent steps taken by the Federal Aviation Administration shows hints of a promising and greener future. Their Destination 2025 plan seeks to “transform the Nation’s aviation system by 2025,” partly by providing renewable and more effective fuels for the majority of commercial aircrafts (as opposed to the usual leaded gasoline) by 2018. Furthermore, the Aviation Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction Plan promises to arrive at “carbon-neutral growth for U.S. commercial aviation by 2020” through improvements in technology, air traffic management, policies, practices, and, again, alternative fuels. This is projected to result in a reduction of 90-115 metric tons of CO₂, the equivalent of 209-267 barrels of oil. Under these directives, the administration’s CLEEN (Continuous Lower Emissions, Energy, and Noise) program, launched in 2010, seeks to “accelerate development and commercial deployment of environmentally promising aircraft technologies and sustainable alternative fuels” and implement these technologies beginning in 2015. With this program, the FAA is hoping to reduce fuel burn—and consequently energy consumption and carbon emissions—by at least 33%.

With our increasingly globalized world, it is unlikely that we are going to see momentous changes in our travel habits anytime soon, but we can make minor changes to our individual behavior that together make a major impact. And certainly, ambitious technological innovations that may seem like a dream are closer than we might think.

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The past few weeks at the Colgate Community Garden have been busy and jam packed with projects and events.  On the evening of Thursday, August 21 we held an open house for Colgate faculty and staff.  We gave tours to visitors who were also able to explore the garden, eat cookies, and purchase vegetables at a farm stand packed with produce picked that afternoon.

The next morning we were graced with a visit from first year volunteers participating in a pre-orienation program led by the Cove.  For two hours they helped us add on to the main pathway of the garden and weed the flower bed.  They also painted some of the rocks that line the pathway of the flower bed.  We look forward to adding more art into the space as more visitors drop by. The Community Garden team was happy to see so many new faces around the garden, and with the arrival of students for the coming semester we look forward to seeing many more visitors!

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