MSCHE Pillars of Change
MSCHE Pillars of Change
Episode 13 - The University of Pittsburgh’s Sustainability and Equity Efforts
In the 13th episode of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE) Pillars of Change Podcast, Commissioner Kimberly Davenport, Partner and Director of Corporate Responsibility with ScottMadden, Inc., hosted Aurora Sharrard, inaugural Assistant Vice Chancellor for Sustainability at the University of Pittsburgh (PA).
The two discussed how the University of Pittsburgh integrates diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) into the Pitt Sustainability Plan and Pitt Climate Action Plan, which outline 68 sustainability goals at the intersection of equity, environment, and economics, including a commitment to carbon neutrality by 2037. The Pitt Sustainability Plan advances three areas of impact: stewardship, exploration, and community and culture. In 2024, the Pitt Climate Action Plan earned the institution the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) Excellence in Sustainability Award.
The University serves nearly 35,000 students across four campuses and offers more than 650 degree and certificate programs.
00:00:17 Kimberly Davenport
Welcome to the Pillars of Change Podcast presented by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. My name is Kimberly Davenport, and I am a partner and Director of Corporate Responsibility with Scott Madden Management Consultants and a Middle States Commissioner. Thank you for joining me for the Commission's continuing series of podcast focusing on topics of diversity, equity and inclusion. Through this podcast series, we spotlight highly effective institutional practices tied to diversity, equity, and inclusion that have made a difference in the lives of our students. Today we are talking to doctor Aurora Sharrard, inaugural assistant Vice Chancellor for sustainability at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Sharrard guides university wide sustainability strategy, activities and partnerships. Today's topics of discussion, which are the Pitt sustainability plan and the Pitt Climate Action plan, steer these efforts with 68 Sustainability goals at the intersection of equity, environment and economics, including pursuing carbon neutrality by 2037. Wow. The Pitt Sustainability Plan advances 3 areas of impact: stewardship, exploration, and community and culture. Recently, the National Association of College and University Business Officers, also known as NACUBO, recognized Pitt with the NACUBO Excellence and Sustainability Award for the work of the Pitt Climate Action plan. In today's episode, Doctor Sharrard will discuss how the University of Pittsburgh integrates DEI into its sustainability efforts, and I am super excited about this conversation. Doctor Sharrard, I welcome you to the podcast.
00:02:22 Aurora Sharrard
Thanks for having me, Kim.
00:02:25 Kimberly Davenport
I have to say I'm excited about this because the work that I do within my firm and corporate responsibility and DEI and hearing about this Pitt sustainability plan is quite fascinating to me. Can you begin by telling us about the Pitt sustainability plan and its significance to Pitt’s mission and commitment to equitable outcomes?
00:02:47 Aurora Sharrard
Sure, the Pitt Sustainability Plan was published in 2018 as the University of Pittsburgh’s first ever university wide guiding document on sustainability, as you said, it has three themes, 15 impact areas, 68 goals. It covers a lot. However, even with that strategy, which was created by individuals across the university, across our regional campuses, including academics, operations, students, faculty, everybody sort of combining to create these goals, one of the primary questions I got when I started at Pitt was what is the university's definition of sustainability? So, I worked with our Chancellor's Advisory Council on sustainability and said, what is your definition? You guys just published this strategy. How do you define sustainability, which is the basis for all these goals? And we came up with the answer, which is this: sustainability is balancing equity, environment, and economics, so current and future generations can thrive. Students and the rest of the Council were very clear that they wanted equity to be first of the three pillars that are traditionally there for sustainability, equity, environment and economics. Equity was first. And they also wanted to ensure that the university recognized that sustainability is not just about future generations, which is the traditional definition, but it's also about current generations, especially this generation of students on college. As you know, they feel a lot more stressors and pressure with everything that's going on in the world, and they recognize that sustainability is not just about the future, it's about us.
00:04:36 Kimberly Davenport
I love that, balancing the future with the current state. Because you're right, there are quite a few stressors. And the boldness to put equity first during a time when equity is just getting beat up as a term. So I really do appreciate that definition. I want to pull this thread on part of the Pitt sustainability plan. Earlier, we mentioned it includes 3 areas and one of the areas was community and culture or is community and culture. And within that area, I believe there is an equity and access goal, and I understand this goal aspires to advance kind of a resource net for incoming students and a committee for socially responsible investing, among other things. Can you talk about this equity and access goal and why it was important to incorporate it into Pitt sustainability plan?
00:05:36 Aurora Sharrard
So equity and access is one of those 15 impact areas. The category actually has four goals, of which you mentioned two. The resource net is important for students and employees. Investing and understanding how our university is responsibly using its endowment to reflect its values is one of those goals. There are also two other goals that I'll call out. One is integrating the tenets of sustainability into the universities, procurement policies and guidelines, and that is both sustainability and diversity. For instance, we have a person on our sustainability team who's embedded in strategic sourcing who is our diversity and sustainability manager and they help ensure that everything, both sustainability and diversity, is pulled through all of the university’s procurement contracts, our contracted vendors, our services and things like that. That's a critical role. And then the other goal in that category is working across all impact areas of the Pitt sustainability plan to ensure benefits for all within the Pitt community. And that's a really hard goal to measure, that last one. But it's actually maybe one of the most important goals in the whole Pitt sustainability plan because it acknowledges that while there are these 68 goals and some of them are very focused on resource nets and water use reduction and lawn reduction and tree canopy growth and embedding sustainability in research, for everything that we do, we really have to make sure that it's benefiting multiple individuals, departments, populations, perspectives reaching out beyond the choir of people who may be part of this work and ensuring that we have diverse voices from across the university and from the communities that we serve and work with across Western Pennsylvania.
00:07:35 Kimberly Davenport
That would be extremely hard to measure.
00:07:40 Aurora Sharrard
There are indicators. There are fun things happen there and I think it really the most important thing is knowing that it's there and maybe being the only person in the room, that's a conversation about something just to bring up. ‘Oh, what did we think about, you know, this community, who's not at the table, but how does what we're talking about work with them or from this perspective?’ Or, you know, how would you know? There are different things where we always talk about universities like to talk about themselves. Right? So, how does it affect our students, staff and faculty? But how does it affect visitors? How does it affect tourists who might come to campus? There sometimes these other perspectives that you're not going to consider until you sort of zoom out and look at it from a 10,000-foot level and really ensure that you're really including everybody and everybody's potential in those conversations.
00:08:35 Kimberly Davenport
I love that response. You know, oftentimes when we think of measures, you know, we think about being precise or accurate and it's not necessarily about that. It’s about drawing attention, putting a spotlight on some of those very important areas, would you agree?
00:08:48 Aurora Sharrard
Yes, and making sure that people know that they have a place in those physical spaces in those conversations, dialogues, projects.
00:08:56 Kimberly Davenport
Speaking of measuring, we know that the impact of climate changes is not equal across populations. Broadly speaking, how does diversity, equity and inclusion and climate sustainability intersect?
00:09:13 Aurora Sharrard
This is a really great question, and a lot of universities across the United States and the world are having these conversations. A lot of businesses, governments are really trying to figure out, you know, climate action itself, reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It’s a very technical, and sometimes it can be an obtuse science and math exercise that people get lost in. But climate change is about all of us, and we only have one planet that we can live on. And so, ensuring that we do all we can to mitigate our climate emergency is extremely important. But one of the things that the University of Pittsburgh did as part of our climate action planning process was we said, you know what? Climate change also puts our mission, our community, and our world at risk. And so as we reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we also need to make sure that that those activities enhance our academic mission, advanced equitable action and ensure economic resilience for the university. So there are three pages in our fifty page Pitt Climate Action plan that we wrote, one on each of those three pieces, and the one about advancing Equitable Action might have been one of the hardest pages to write because we really wanted to make sure, like I said before, that we had all the stakeholders, voices and opportunities reflected in that section. I also think those 3 pages on academic mission, equitable action, and economic resilience have really been received by the Pitt community as a call to action. So different members of our community saw themselves in each of the things that that we called out there and have actually gone forth and done and made change a really easy example not in the equity, diversity and inclusion space is, you know, we said essentially, there's an opportunity to include more things about climate action in our curriculum right in Pitt courses, create new courses in this space and some faculty actually stepped in and adding climate change, climate action modules into different courses. There are also a couple faculty at the university who saw that and also created an environmental justice module that was shared between the School of Education and I believe the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences that they delivered and climate was a piece of that, but certainly not the only part of that that coursework. Specifically, in the advancing Equitable Action piece, you know, we basically said in the Pitt Climate Action Plan, we're committed to promoting equity in the following ways, generally: culture, education, investments, community, and celebration. And I think there are lots of different aspects of some of those, but the idea is more about engaging diverse identities and perspectives, ensuring that those diverse perspectives are also getting benefits from the decisions that are being made as opposed to just weighing in on them and then saying thanks high 5 like, you know, see you later, thanks for the input, but also empowering climate action ambassadors to actually understand the journey and be able to communicate it to others who may not be as deep in the weeds about some of these decisions. Also, Pittsburgh is a traditional energy community. The first oil well in the United States is in Pennsylvania. There's active natural gas fracking in the region as well, and you know the energy transition here is felt deeply. There are a lot of industrial communities that were left behind when steel mills failed and you know, energy, you know, coal production moved elsewhere. And so there are, there’s definitely this balance in Pennsylvania of how climate action shapes not just the globe, but also our region and the economic opportunities for individuals. How that works with traditionally underserved communities that were already overburdened by industrial facilities. You know, we have a lot of environmental justice now known as Justice 40 Communities in the region that, you know have legacy hardships and, you know, really trying to figure out how those environmental justice communities can continue to make positive progress. And you know, leapfrog into the next level of the economy while also mitigating some of their environmental challenges is really something that the region is very focused on, not necessarily around the climate action, climate change lens, but really recognizing that some of those sources of essentially pollution and, you know, economic challenge for those communities are also linked to climate change.
00:14:39 Kimberly Davenport
There was something you mentioned… engaging the diverse identities and perspectives, and I think about DEI that's kind of one of the most inspiring parts about it when you think about making some of these decisions, you know? Inspiring change, problem solving, engaging communities, is that diverse part that really brings value. And so when you're having this intersection, it seems like, you know, from a tactical level, that's one of the benefits of having DEI intersecting with climate sustainability. Just the diverse perspective.
00:15:16 Aurora Sharrard
It definitely is. And so, the University of Pittsburgh also has a unique model that they call the neighborhood commitments. Where we are deeply engaged with three traditionally underserved neighborhoods in the city of Pittsburgh, including the 4th one which is the one that we occupy. So Pittsburgh is a city of neighborhoods. There are 90 neighborhoods. The University of Pittsburgh sits in Oakland. Not Oakland, CA; Oakland, the neighborhood in Pittsburgh, and then we also have community engagement centers in the neighborhoods of Homewood, Hazelwood and the Hill district. All traditionally, you know, underserved, very racially diverse neighborhoods that the university engaged with for decades and really started investing in and with those communities on a shared strategy, making 10-year commitments to actually like go in and lease property in those space. Not by and own but help build community wealth and create shared community engagement centers where neighborhoods could have services that they were interested in, that the university could help bring, and also for university and students who wanted to engage with residents in these neighborhoods to try to jump off and do research in projects within a way that in a way that reflected and respected residents needs so, and that model has been great for really helping the university community and the university as an institution engage more broadly in Pittsburgh. And it's also a great opportunity to, you know, if you're looking for diverse resident voices for specific a public policy project public health project, you know something in law, computer science or whatever, it's a great way to go and work with people who want to work with you and that relationship is important.
00:17:27 Kimberly Davenport
Let’s talk a little about the students. How have Pitt’s sustainability efforts affected student learning outcomes across the student populations?
00:17:37 Aurora Sharrard
Yeah. So I'm not sure if I'm the right individual to talk about student learning outcomes specifically because I'm not a faculty member.
00:17:45 Kimberly Davenport
OK.
00:17:47 Aurora Sharrard
But students have been a really big part of the University of Pittsburgh’s Sustainability journey. They were some of the first, you know, members of the campus community who really started saying, you know, what are we doing about the environment? What are we doing about equity? How are we better engaging with our communities? And really, helping those conversations happen in a different way. Pitt students generally want to get out and get involved in the city outside of campus, right? We’re a very urban university, and students want to know what's going on, and they also want to make a positive impact while they're in college on the community that they're part of. And so, like I mentioned before, those community engagement centers, which the first one was founded in 2016 or 17, I think, there are pieces of that but students have long been getting out in the community and collaborating with Pittsburgh nonprofits and things like that who are invested in both environmental spaces, community spaces to really help advance environmental and social justice within the Pittsburgh Community. We did an interesting survey as part of the higher Education Climate Consortium of Pittsburgh a few years back, which I used to co chair, and we scanned students across 9 universities and colleges in the Pittsburgh region and we said OK in the space of climate action, what do you care about? Do you care about energy, climate change, carbon neutrality, sustainability, sustainable development goals? I forget exact all the words. Socially responsible investing, environmental justice, social justice, and you can see different students from different universities respond in different ways to that survey and prioritize different terminologies and approaches. And Pitt students solidly chose environmental and social justice as their answer. That sort of tells you where they are today and where they have been over time. So Pitt students advocated and created the Student Office of Sustainability in 2014. It's a physical place in our student union. They have 25 affiliated student organizations who work with them on projects both on and off campus, advancing all the different, you know, colors of sustainability in different ways, and we lovingly call them the ‘SOOS.’ They're celebrating their 10th anniversary this year, which is great, and they're very active and involved in sustainability on campus. Our Pitt Sustainability Plan would not exist without SOOS and their continued advocacy over time.
00:20:29 Kimberly Davenport
That is awesome. And you started your answer by saying you may not be the right person to talk to. I think absolutely you are. What you described is that student experience. It's probably what's drawing students to the university. The fact that this is such a priority.
00:20:45 Aurora Sharrard
Yes. So, maybe I started with I couldn't talk about student outcomes because, you know, I can't talk about curricular, you know, academic curriculum student outcomes. You know, that said, we do have academic offerings and undergraduate sustainability certificate that's been growing over time. A transcript of distinction which is not just classroom work, but also out of classroom work that students can apply for, and both of those have been growing also. So there are these academic opportunities, but maybe my answer shows that you know the average Pitt student is both in the classroom and out of the classroom and doing that sort of engaged learning, experiential learning and sustainability specifically because you can't -- sustainability. You can learn about it in a classroom, but until you're in a conversation with somebody who thinks differently than you and has different ideas about how to make change in the system that you're trying to change, you're not really going to get to a solution and know how to implement a sustainability project unless you try to do it with [inaudible]
00:21:44 Kimberly Davenport
You’ve got to get out and do it.
00:21:45 Aurora Sharrard
You've got to.
00:21:46 Kimberly Davenport
Gotta get out and do it.
00:21:51 Kimberly Davenport
When I think about sustainability and equity efforts, you know there are challenges. It's not easy work, but I'd say the rewards are sweet. I think you'd agree with that.
00:22:03 Aurora Sharrard
Yeah.
00:22:05 Kimberly Davenport
What are your greatest successes and challenges in advancing sustainability and equity efforts at your institution?
00:22:12 Aurora Sharrard
Hm. So, there are always challenges. I always like to put those challenges as opportunities. Right? Because I sometimes say that a no is not a no forever. It's just a person or a place, or a department or whatever it is, that’s not ready for change yet, or maybe not in the way that you know, you think it could happen. So I would say there are lots of different challenges to embedding equity within any large institution. We've had success in the equity and access impact area. You asked about the resource net goal for students.
00:22:59 Kimberly Davenport
Yes.
00:23:01 Aurora Sharrard
And I think that's a place that Pitt has been very successful in over time. The goal is to basically proactively meet students physical, social, financial and mental health needs with a variety of different strategies, and even in my 6 years at Pitt, I've seen the university grow our suite of services and opportunities there. So, a really good example is in 2015, the University of Pittsburgh founded the Pitt Pantry. Like many universities, you know an on campus food pantry for struggling with food access, food security and things like that. It was actually started out of sustainability at the time. It's now run by student affairs and their wellness program. At the same time we started the first – I said the first, we only have one. We started her on campus student-run thrift store, which is now… it wasn't started as a basic needs effort for the university, but it was sort of started at the same time and helped provide affordable second-hand clothing and other items to students at a low price, right? And reducing environmental impact and reducing costs of livability as a college student. Both of these programs are now run out of student affairs as part of our basic needs services on campus, really bundling together the opportunities that we have as an institution to give every student the resources that they need to thrive. And that approach, that sort of like weaving together different concepts I think has been one of the ways of the university has really helped make sure that we're reaching every student who needs the type of assistance that that some of those programs offer.
00:24:55 Kimberly Davenport
That's amazing. That is amazing. This resource net goal in the lives that you're touching through this, you're right – highly successful.
00:25:06 Aurora Sharrard
Well and like I said before, students are very motivated to then help run those programs on campus, right? With Pitt Pantry is mostly student-run. The Pitt thrift store is like student lad and student run. While it does have revenue, that revenue goes back into the store and helps students then do different types of sales and offerings. We've also paired that program specifically with our zero waste move out efforts. So when students move out in the spring, they'll leave all sorts of things behind, they sort of give it to us and then we capture that information and we'll sell it back to students at a low cost in the fall. So, mini fridges, lamps, you know all the things that they could be buying firsthand and you know at five times the price somewhere else they can get on campus and just put straight into their dorm rooms.
00:26:00 Kimberly Davenport
Has to be making life easier. I'm recalling my purchases as a college student many years ago, would have loved to have something like that.
00:26:08 Aurora Sharrard
Yeah, it also helps reduce waste to landfills. So yeah.
00:26:12 Kimberly Davenport
Exactly. You know, double win. Doctor Sharrard, one of one of my favorite things when I'm having conversations with amazing leaders like you, is to ask for a few of what I call golden nuggets or advice. What advice do you have for institutions seeking to weave together sustainability and diversity, equity and inclusion?
00:26:40 Aurora Sharrard
Sometimes I get asked a different version of this question, but it's going to tenor my answer to you and I'm going to tell you what it is.
00:26:44
OK.
00:26:46 Aurora Sharrard
People often say how do I get started in sustainability, generally? And my answer is always well, I can't tell you that, right? Because your journey is very different than mine personally. And it's very different than the University of Pittsburgh's journey, if we're talking about institutions, right? But I think where people can start is first giving themselves and their institution credit for what it is already doing, right? If you take that question, you say internal the mirror in and you say, ‘what am I already doing?’ You're probably going to find things that you didn't even think about before in that realm of sustainability and diversity. And you're like, oh, we really are partnering with the community in this way. We’re already partnering with women and minority owned businesses and XYZ. We're already embedding sustainability and diversity into some of our procurement activities. Whatever that answer is for your institution, I think you have to start there and then you have to figure out what's next, right? You can't do everything at once, so what are people willing and able to do right away? You might be surprised by what moves first. I was certainly surprised when I started a Pitt of some of our first initiatives and successes. But those first steps are very important, but setting those longer term goals, creating that shared vision and figuring out how you're going to get there, how you're going to measure that success, that's really where the joy is in the process because once the goal is set, then you have to work towards it and say OK promised everybody that we're going to do these sustainability and diversity things altogether. How are we doing? Can we do it on this project? What about this one. Is this a good fit?
00:28:31 Aurora Sharrard
And then it starts to become part of your culture and that's a really, that's what we're really all trying to build, right? It's sustainability, diversity, equity. None of these things should be separate. It should all just be part of what we as people and institutions who already understand the intersectionality of all of these conversations anyway, right? And when we make it part of our culture, then it is who we are, and we all make a better world together.
00:29:02 Kimberly Davenport
Thank you for that, and words of wisdom I really hope our listeners are picking up these nuggets and taking it with them. I love the idea of turning that mirror around and looking at yourself. What have you already done? I don't think we do that often enough, so thank you for those words.
00:29:20 Aurora Sharrard
Yeah, I've got another one for you. This is my, I say it all the time, but a friend of mine recently said that it's the one thing that she learned from me that she repeats back to him, and he doesn't always appreciate it, the answer to every question you don't ask is no.
00:29:41
Huh. OK. I get it.
00:29:43 Aurora Sharrard
So and I learned that from a book by Linda Babcock, who's a Carnegie Mellon University professor, called Women Don't Ask. It was actually the first book in a series about women asking for raises and how women don't ask and advocate for themselves, and it's true. There's a funny story in that book where a student comes to her and says all the men are getting paid, you know, teaching assistant roles and none of the women are. Why are we not? So she storms into the Dean's office, who happens to be her husband and says what is happening here? He's like, well, all the men ask for those roles and so I gave them to them. And so I think that's a great take away, right?
00:30:25 Kimberly Davenport
That is awesome.
00:30:26 Aurora Sharrard
If you don’t ask the question, that change may never happen. If you don't challenge what's being put out there, there's just going to advance in the way that the person who's proposing it has proposed it, and it might be great, but you can make it better by asking a slight question or big question and helping shape a better future.
00:30:44 Kimberly Davenport
I love that, and I'm taking that nugget with me actually. Well, thank you Doctor Sharrard for for sharing your work with our listeners. We really enjoyed having you with us today.
00:30:58 Aurora Sharrard
Yeah. Thank you very much for having me, Kim. I enjoyed the conversation, and I hope somebody learns from our journey at the University of Pittsburgh and I look forward to listening to some other podcasts and learning from others.
00:31:10 Kimberly Davenport
For sure and to our listeners, thank you for joining us. If you'd like the Commission to highlight the efforts of your institution in a feature podcast, then please visit msche.org/PillarsofChange to submit your idea. On behalf of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and our lovely guest Dr. Aurora Sharrard, I am Kimberly Davenport saying thank you.