Business View Magazine - May 2016 121
that that building received,” she says. Cusker adds: “It’s
a slow process. Every institution wants to quantify and
track everything and it may take another four to five years
to really have a kind of system in place that’s successful
and that allows us to do that.”
NAU’s comprehensive sustainability programs and initia-
tives recently earned it a ranking of 37th Greenest School
in America from Best Colleges.com, based on its Gold
Star rating from The Association for the Advancement
of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). Cusker
elaborates upon the school’s high profile: “What makes
us stand out is that we really are trying to look at sustain-
ability in all areas - from how we operate as a campus,
what we role-model for the next generation of students,
and the many sorts of academic and extra-curricular op-
portunities they have no matter what their major is. NAU
is perhaps not at the top of the list for prestigious aca-
demic institutions, but we have some really talented fac-
ulty doing really great things around environmental and
sustainability research and that strengthens the holistic
approach that we take here. And we have a pretty diverse
group of staff - dining, housing and residents’ life, facility
services; we have a very good working partnership and
it helps us move things along and do some really cool
things.”
And when it comes to green initiatives that foster sus-
tainability and conserve the environment, “cool things” is
precisely what we need.
PREFERRED VENDORS
Duncan Family Farms
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Hardison-Downey Construction
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Students at NAU work far beyond campus to impact
regional environmental campaigns.
The student run Green Fund is the organization on cam-
pus that allows great projects like the solar thermal air
heating project come to fruition.
