Greek Life Sustainability Team: Big House, Small Footprint

This initiative focuses on retrofitting fraternity and sorority chapter houses to reduce energy and water consumption.  The next step for our group is to combine both the behavioral and structural changes into one system to maximize the program’s effectiveness and streamline the process to make it applicable to more chapters. Thus, we created a classification system similar to the LEED certification program and the University's Sustainable Workplace program. The goal of the system is to ease houses into the energy saving process by letting them start with several small adjustments, such as changing light bulbs, to help introduce the chapters to energy savings.  Our goal is that these projects will culminate in each house performing energy audits to improve energy efficiency on a larger scale.  We need financial support in order to give houses reward packages to motivate the continued movement towards energy efficiency. The ultimate goal is to perform subsidized energy audits on chapter houses, with the agreement that the money we take off the initial energy audit price will be reinvested towards renovations suggested through the audit. Once the houses see the money saving capabilities of the small changes, they will be more willing to take on these larger projects.