Kristen works for NYU's Office of Sustainability and is an Environmental Studies major at NYU CAS. She loves cooking, sleeping, adventuring and meeting dogs along the way.
The weekend of February 22nd through the 25th marked the 5th Annual New York Wild Film Festival held at the Explorer’s Club in NYC. A few of us at the Office of Sustainability were fortunate to attend the Sunday Day Program of the Festival.
The films featured were BLUE, The Frozen Road, Ice Call: Backyards Project — Sam Favret, City on the Water, and Happening: A Clean Energy Revolution as well asNYU’s own “WILD in NY” Short Film Contest Finalist Unnatural. I interviewed my fellow NYU Office of Sustainability festival-goers to hear their thoughts on the inspiring and shocking footage we saw throughout the day.
Welcome to Green Grants: The People Behind the Projects. Below is an interview with Emily Hirsch (NYU Wagner School of Public Service, MPA Public and Nonprofit Management and Policy), who was awarded a Green Grant to install a dishwasher in the Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life for her project, Bronfman Goes Green.
Emily Hirsch with the newly installed dishwasher at the Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life. The dishwasher will reduce waste and foster sustainable practices at Bronfman.
Green Grants (GG): Where did you get the idea for your Green Grants project and why did you see a need for this project?
Emily Hirsch (EH): When I started working at the Bronfman Center, I was responsible for office management and I noticed how many paper goods we went through in a week. I’ve always been passionate about the environment, so I started thinking about ways we could reduce our paper good usage. Since this is the Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life, a dishwasher became more complex due to keeping it kosher.
Kashrut (Jewish dietary law) in its strictest form does not allow meat and milk to be combined in any way. This makes a dishwasher complicated because we can’t use the same cutlery for both meat and dairy and would also need separate dishwashers and sinks. Our solution was to pick either a meat or dairy dishwasher for the [Green Grant]. We serve more dairy meals than meat meals and a dairy dishwasher would have the most impact on our community to reduce the amount of paper waste we went through.
Welcome to Green Grants: The People Behind the Projects. Below is an interview with Jon Chin (NYU Steinhardt, Graduate) and Kitty Liang (NYU Stern, Undergraduate) of Open Kitchen, an initiative of Share Meals that received a Green Grant. Open Kitchen is a series of community classes that brings NYU students together and teaches them how to cook. Stay up-to-date with upcoming events here.
Jon Chin (Co-founder of Share Meals) and Kitty Liang of Open Kitchen
GG: Where did you get the idea for your Green Grants project and why did you see a need for this project?
Jon Chin: Another Steinhardt Master’s student [Leanne Brown] a couple years ago did her thesis on developing a $4 per day cookbook, so I thought it would be great to take that and put it into practice. Our first Open Kitchen class was led by her, and we were able to get students the culinary and shopping skills that they needed.
NYU is this weird and tricky thing. It’s in the middle of NYC, so the cost of living is extremely high. This is the first time students are living on their own and also a lot of them probably aren’t coming from high-cost living areas, so it’s really tough for them to be able to budget correctly–to pay for tuition, clothes and especially food–and I know that if students aren’t eating well, then they’re not performing well. So one really great way to build a stronger community, to build a better NYU, is to make sure our students are eating well. I want to show students a) how to cook for themselves–if they can cook at home, they can reduce their grocery budget by a lot–and b) how to cook healthily. We might be feeding ourselves, but we might be feeding ourselves the wrong things, and that does disastrous things for our health and for our energy and performance. I want to build a better NYU through food.
This article is the first in a series on Green Grants: The People Behind the Projects. Below is an interview with Jason Pessel (NYU Stern MBA ’15), who received a Green Grant for his project, Reefill. Reefill is a network of stations that gives members access to cold, filtered tap water throughout NYU’s campus and the greater NYC community. This year, Reefill memberships are free to all NYU students.
Jason Pessel (Stern MBA ’15), Co-founder of Reefill
GG: Where did you get the idea for your Green Grants project?
JP: It started as an idea when I was walking through Manhattan. There’s no water fountains that you can find or anything–they just don’t exist in the middle of Manhattan. So I bought bottled water, and I was with my cousin and he started screaming at me, saying “That’s tap water! What are you doing? You are making all this waste!” So I started researching and realized that like 50% of bottled water is tap water, and disposed water bottles lead to problems with plastic in our oceans. In doing that research, before I was even at NYU, I realized when we buy bottled water, we are just buying tap water–it’s chilled and filtered, and then they are putting a fancy label on it and we are spending a lot of money on it and it is creating all this waste. But tap water is pretty much everywhere, so why couldn’t we find another way to make chilled and filtered tap water on-the-go that’s easier for people to access? So that kind of became the idea.
