Yale Blue Green: Past, Present, and Future
Yale Blue Green began its work more than a decade ago in 2011 when Darcy Pollack ’87, a member of the Association of Yale Alumni board, founded and chaired YBG as a shared interest group supporting university and alumni sustainability efforts. This effort was nurtured by Henry Kwan, the director for Shared Interest Groups at the Association of Yale Alumni (AYA), in an effort to support members of the Yale community to make a positive difference in the world. In 2013, Lauren Graham, an alumna of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies FES ’13, joined YBG as vice-chair, taking the baton from Darcy Pollack as chair in the 2014-15 school year.
The five years that followed were a time of rapid growth for YBG, as Lauren Graham hosted monthly calls with the membership, created a website to promote the group’s work, helped launch Chapters in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, DC, Boston, and San Francisco. YBG supported the Yale Environmental Sustainability Summits, a kind of Yale Davos gathering, in 2015, 2017, 2019 that drew 300 to campus in November of those years as a joint venture between the School of Management and the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, which was renamed the Yale School of the Environmental after the arrival of Indy Burke as dean. In recognition of her work, Lauren received the 2019 YAA Leadership Award for Volunteer Innovation and Service, and Yale Blue Green received the YAA Board of Governors Excellence Award in 2020.
In 2019 a group of YBG members and other alumni launched the Sustainability Initiative that urged “Yale alumni and the broader Yale community to join us in strongly encouraging Yale to expand and strengthen its commitment to leadership in sustainability, which is a globally applicable decision-making framework balancing people, planet and prosperity.” The Sustainability Initiative gathered nearly 500 signatures, which came from every decade of Yale College since 1960, and from all the graduate and professional schools, demonstrating a broad interest. YBG established a membership base that now includes 1500 alumni and that led to a dialogue between YBG and University leaders, including President Peter Salovey. The December 1, 2019 proposal declared: “Yale has an undisputed reputation for educating the next generation of leaders and innovators in every field. Now is the time to ensure that Yale is on the right side of history in addressing today’s global crises such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and economic inequality, and their overarching discipline, sustainability.” As the proposal observed: “We believe that Yale has an important and urgent opportunity to establish itself as a major global leader in sustainability.”
2020 proved to be a turning point for YBG. The YBG board launched The Sustainability Fund to support student research in Yale’s Office of Sustainability, which to date has raised over $60,000. The Sustainabilty Fund has enabled YBG members to have direct contact the student researchers and with the leadership of the Sustainability Office as it stewards the Yale Sustainabilty Plan, with YBG annually providing feedback from alumni on the University’s progress. In 2020 the University also launched a new initiative called Yale Planetary Solutions “that unites leadership and experts across campus, and across disciplines, to advance solutions to the greatest environmental challenges facing the planet.” YBG supports Planetary Solutions today because it addresses some of the important ideas in the YBG Proposal. It includes interdisciplinary scholarship on the profound environmental issues of our time, focuses on today’s planetary challenges, and includes Yale’s commitments to sustainability. In support of that effort, YBG has organized Yale’s Green Resources to help alumni and members of the community understand the breadth of the University’s efforts on behalf of environmental sustainability.
As Lauren Graham took on duties as chief of staff at Hunger Free America, a national anti-hunger advocacy and direct service nonprofit working to end domestic hunger, a YBG board began to provide direction in fall 2020. Today, the YBG Alumni Board meets monthly and “serves as a hub for thought leadership, collaborative action, lifelong learning, and social impact on a range of topics relating to the environment and sustainability.” The activities of YBG include a monthy call and newsletter for alumni, webinars, special programs, Cross Campus mentoring, Sustainability Fund support, and seven chapters across the US in Boston, New York, DC, Chicago, San Francisco, and in the UK, as well as the Class of ’94.
Those interested in participating in YBG are invited to get involved and to contact YBG for further information.