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.
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.