Joe Culhane

Well, this has been a good experience. I hope you all have gotten some great things out of it! During the course of this challenge, our Environmental Sustainability Club at PCC has gotten into looking at sustainability from a broader lense and scope. We’re in the process of changing the club name to the Environmental Justice Club to better express our desire to be more action oriented on social justice, equity, and inclusion issues. 

Here’s a look at an early logo concept. The well known symbol of the fist in eh air is incorporated to hold a nettle leaf, nettle is an incredible herbal medicine, source of food, and is also a riparian plant which means it goes into disturbed lands and polluted lands and literally helps to repair the earth! Anyways, I’m excited about it and wanted to share that with all of you!

This challenge has flown by! Hopefully everyone is enjoying the experience so far. Here’s a pic I took from today at Cascade Campus, we’re well underway in this Take Back the Tap campaign and things are moving along really well. For those of you who aren’t aware, we’re aiming to ban the sale of plastic water bottles district wide!

If you haven’t already done so, you can show your support by texting “I ❤️ TAP”  to 69866

This has been a fun challenge, just remembering to hop on here daily has proved to be a good challenge in and of itself! One lesson that is clear to me from this experience is that doing it as a group/class/team is both helpful for getting involved but also for the accountability and desire to make sure to participate!

This is a great exercise in awareness. I see how I could do even better and the trickiest part with that is to not get too hard on myself about not completing all the ambitious goals I've set. The dynamics of being a full time student and working 20 hours a week on top of that while also having a wife and two children at home presents a very real daily challenge in balance to be sure!

My how the days fly by. This challenge has been good and certainly helped to keep me in check with some daily activities. I'm getting most of my challenges accomplished but there is certainly room for inprovement. I imagine others are experiencing the goal setting and the reality of our daily lives and demands making it harder to accomplish everything we'd like to. This is a busy bee kinda reality we got going on here!

Back to Portland I go! The last keynote at AASHE 2017, Dr. Heather Hackney was SO GOOD. Her ability to relate social justice to sustainability is impressive to say the least. I have learned so much at this conference and it will take a bit to unpack all my notes and thoughts!

This has been a fun challenge so far and I'm finding it to be even more challenging being out of town these past couple days. While I am at a sustainability conference, I am also in Texas (which I had to fly too...)

and have a different set of daily obstacles to deal with and navigate around. Thankfully San Antonio is a really accessible/walkable place and I'm even getting to bike around today and hit up a local co-op!

Hooray, it has begun!