Category: Events

Upcoming webinar: Transformational Resilience

View the recorded program on the ALA SustainRT YouTube Channel

Please join us for our next SustainRT webinar on Thursday, 6/8/17 from 12:15-12:45 PM (Eastern).

Bob Doppelt will speak to us on the topic, “Transformational Resilience: How Building Human Resilience to Climate Disruption Can Safeguard Society and Increase Well-being.”

REGISTER NOW! 

About our presenter:

Bob Doppelt is Executive Director of The Resource Innovation Group (TRIG), a non-partisan social science-based sustainability and global climate change education, research and technical assistance organization affiliated with the Center for Sustainable Communities at Willamette University, where he is also a Senior Fellow. In addition, Bob is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management at the University of Oregon where he teaches systems thinking and global warming policy. He has also taught at the Presidio Graduate School in San Francisco and the Bainbridge Graduate Institute on sustainable management.

Bob is the author of Leading Change toward Sustainability: A Change Management Guide for Business, Government, and Civil Society (Greenleaf Publishing, 2003), The Power of Sustainable Thinking: How To Create a Positive Future for the Climate, The Planet, Your Organization and Your Life, (Earthscan Publishing, 2008) and Transformational Resilience: How to Use Climate Change and Related Adversities to Learn, Grow and Thrive (Greenleaf Publishing, 2016). He also writes regular columns on global warming for the Eugene Register-Guard and the Salem Statesman-Journal newspapers and is a frequent speaker at workshops and conferences in the U.S. and Europe.

Check out his website here.

AASHE STARS for Librarians (Webinar)

View a recording of this program on the
ALA SustainRT YouTube Channel

On March 9th, 12:15 – 12:45 PM EST Amy Brunvand will present, “STARS and Beyond:  Adventures of an embedded Librarian in the Campus Sustainability Office.” To register for the webinar, click here.

About the webinar: During the past year Amy Brunvand, an academic librarian at the University of Utah, has been on leave from the library in order to work out of the campus Sustainability Office.   Her main project was helping to compile a Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System™ (STARS) report ,a transparent, self-reporting framework for colleges and universities to measure their sustainability performance that is used for ranking by Sierra Magazine and Princeton Green Schools among others.   Along the way she gained insights into what drives campus sustainability and how academic libraries and librarians can get involved in and offer support to sustainability efforts across the whole campus organization.   [30 mins]

Bio: Amy Brunvand is an academic librarian and government information specialist at the University of Utah where she has spent the past year on leave working out of the campus Sustainability Office.  Besides librarianship, she writes a monthly environmental news column for Catalyst magazine (catalystmagazine.net).  She also writes poetry, and her poems have recently appeared in Dark Mountain, Kudzu House Quarterly, saltfront, Terrain.org and the anthology “Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in our Hands.”

Librarian Amy Brunvand waits for the bus in an air pollution filter mask that was distributed as part of a University of Utah student project to call attention to air quality problems.

Missed our last webinar? The recording is now online!

David Selden, National Indian Law Library, spoke about the founding of the Committee on Environmental Sustainability under the American Association of Law Libraries. Their activities include a Conference Travel Offset Project and a Resolution on Sustainability in Law Libraries.

View the RECORDING, slidedeck & resources:

For more information about SustainRT activities and events, click here.

ALA Annual 2017 Speaker!

We are excited to announce that Bill McKibben will be a featured speaker at ALA Annual 2017!

Bill McKibben is co-founder and Senior Advisor at 350.org, an international, grass roots climate movement that leverages people power to develop people-centric solutions to the climate crisis. McKibben is a prolific writer and opened the general public’s eyes to the urgency of climate change back in 1989 with his book The End of Nature, which has been published worldwide in over 24 languages. Among his many related books are Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age; Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet; Maybe One: A Case for Smaller Families; and Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth.

McKibben suggests that we conceptualize climate change as a threat on the order of World War III and respond accordingly. With this mindset we can make societal shifts similar to those experienced in the 1940’s wartime era and move to renewable energy, energy efficiency, and energy storage. There is urgency to his message as climate change is happening more quickly than scientists anticipated. McKibben argues that the status quo is a luxury we cannot afford. The nonviolent war that McKibben proposes will save lives and has the potential to produce millions of jobs.
His address is made possible through the partnership of SustainRT, ALA’s Social Responsibilities Round Table, the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association, and the American Indian Library Association. We are honored and fortunate to have Mr. McKibben join us at ALA Annual to bring us his insights into the role of libraries during a time of climate change.

Date, time, and location of McKibben’s featured address at ALA annual in Chicago are forthcoming.

To help us bring this important program to ALA and support our ongoing work, please consider making a donation to ALA’s Sustainability Roundtable (SustainRT). The instructions to ensure it gets to SustainRT are below. Thank you for anything you can contribute!

To Make a Donation

Online donations are accepted at the Donate to ALA website. Select ALA Roundtables and choose SustainRT for your donation.

If you prefer to mail your donation, please fill out the online form, print it out, and send a check, payable to ALA at:

American Library Association
Development Office
50 East Huron Street
Chicago, IL 60611

The American Library Association is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit institution. Contributions are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. Our federal tax identification number is 36-2166947.

National Indian Law Library (Webinar)

View a recording of this presentation on the
ALA SustainRT YouTube Channel

Thursday December 1, 2016, 12:15-12:45pm EST:  David Selden, National Indian Law Library, will talk about the founding of the Committee on Environmental Sustainability under the American Association of Law Libraries. Their activities include a Conference Travel Offset Project and a Resolution on Sustainability in Law Libraries. Free and open to all! REGISTER NOW: (http://bit.ly/2fhH2o0)

Upcoming SustainRT Webinar – Libraries and the Sacredness of Community

Rachael_SheaDon’t miss the next SustainRT webinar, Libraries and the Sacredness of Community, on May 19th, 2016, from 12:15-12:45 P.M. (EST).  Rachael Shea, Head of Public Services at Clark University will be our presenter.  The webinar will explore the importance of relationship and the many ways libraries can contribute to creating sustainable communities. Rachael will describe how the “interconnectedness of things” and the interplay of exchange – give and take – is what underlies true sustainability.

REGISTER NOW

Do you have a sustainability-related library story to tell?

We are looking for presenters who would like to share their sustainability-related library projects during our program at ALA Annual 2016 in Orlando.

Format: Presenters will have five minutes each to tell their story, with follow-up questions at the end of the program. Presenters may opt to use one fixed image (electronic or otherwise) as part of their presentation. The program will be held at ALA Annual on Sunday, June 26th from 10:30-11:30AM.

Eligibility: Anyone may submit a proposal, though preference will be given to SustainRT members.

Purpose: To share creative and important work that contributes to a more resilient, harmonious and holistic community through economic, environmental and social aspects of sustainability work being done in libraries of all kinds.  We are seeking a diverse representation of innovative sustainability projects that go beyond the traditional “greening” of libraries.

To submit a proposal, send an email to Jason Nosek jnosek@chipublib.org with the following:

  • Name
  • Institution or organization
  • Phone
  • Email
  • SustainRT member Y/N
  • Title of your presentation
  • Description of the presentation you are proposing to make
  • Brief statement telling us what excites you about your topic and/or the sustainability movement within the library profession

Proposals are due by Monday, April 4, 2016.

For more information about SustainRT, including how to become a member, see: http://www.ala.org/sustainrt/

Book-to-Action Program [Webinar]

View a recording of this program on the
ALA SustainRT YouTube Channel

 

Please join us Thursday, February 4, 2016, 12:15 – 12:45 pm (EST) for our next SustainRT Webinar – Collaborating for sustainability: community and publisher partnerships and the book to action program

Webinar topic: Local community organizations and publishers can be valuable partners for libraries in creating sustainability-oriented programming. Join us on February 4 for this free SustainRT webinar to learn as Sally Thomas and Michael Weaver describe Book-to-Action programs which extend the idea of a book discussion by not only scheduling an author/speaker, but also partnering with a public service organization for a volunteer day or other community service opportunity. For more information, see the Book-to-Action Toolkit.

REGISTER NOW!