The Office for Sustainability announced the winners of its annual Sustainability Champions Awards during the spring keynote and awards presentation, “Treenote: Soils, Canopies & Climate,” Wednesday, April 11.
Student winners
Cara Fagerholm is a fifth-year undergraduate student from Bainbridge, Ohio, majoring in both mechanical engineering and environmental studies. She is a member of the initial cohort living in the CWRU Sustainability House and is a past chair of the Student Sustainability Council (SSC). Many fellow students, including SSC members and a past Student Sustainability Champion award winner, nominated Fagerholm.
Fagerholm has been very involved in ongoing SSC leadership development and projects, such as the annual Farm Harvest Festival event.
Fagerholm said she is “motivated by the injustices that environmental degradation causes to people that have the least flexibility and opportunity to respond to the issues presented and who most heavily bear the burden of externalized costs. I hope to help rectify the imbalance in our triple bottom line: people, planet, profit. I hope to protect and elevate recognition for our natural wonders (whether it is the Redwoods National Park, clean Great Lakes water, the food we eat or the air we breathe) so that future generations may continue to recognize the connectivity of our planet and be inspired to better the world.”
Naveen Rehman is a fourth-year nutritional biochemistry major and religious studies minor from Toledo, Ohio. Over the past several years, Rehman has held multiple executive positions with CWRU’s Food Recovery Network and has been instrumental in the development and expansion of what was formerly CWRU’s Food Week, now the weeklong Food Symposium.
Rehman also works for the Office for Sustainability as a Sustainability Ambassador focused on the topic of sustainable food. Narcisz Fejes, a SAGES fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences, nominated Rehman.
Rehmen is motivated to take action on campus because she believes that “by taking care of the planet, we are taking care of each other. To me, sustainability is about inspiring mindfulness for the value of resources and taking initiative to use those resources to help others.”
When asked what she is proud of in regard to CWRU’s sustainability program, she said “CWRU’s commitment through Bon Appetit [CWRU’s food service provider] to local, sustainable and fair food is where [CWRU] excels in the sustainability arena.”
Faculty winner
Chris Laszlo, a professor of organizational behavior, won the Faculty Sustainability Champion Award. Laszlo has been associated with the Fowler Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit for six years, the last two as faculty executive director. He stepped down in February to head the new Quantum Leadership initiative at the Weatherhead School of Management.
One of Laszlo’s graduate students nominated him for the award.
He has taught sustainable business principles for many years, publishing several books on the value of sustainability for the business community.
On sustainability at CWRU, he said: “For me, as a faculty member, CWRU stands out for its visionary thought leadership in sustainability. This leadership includes the work of David Cooperrider, Ron Fry, Richard Boyatzis, Diana Bilimoria, Anurag Gupta, and many others at the Weatherhead School, and faculty members from other departments including cognitive neuroscience and engineering. I’m honored to be part of this effort.”
Staff winner
Bill Frank has the distinction of being the most-nominated Sustainability Champion winner to date. Frank is the CWRU biomedical service engineer. He started working at the university in 1984 in an electronics shop in the Department of Pharmacology. In 1993, he shifted to the new the Scientific Instrument Repair Center and grew the facility from a department service to a campuswide service.
Frank reports that he has single-handedly performed approximately 10,000 laboratory equipment services of all kinds at CWRU. In particular, his work with ultra efficient -80ºC freezers in the medical school has helped reduce lab energy use.
Regarding his sustainability impact, Frank said: “I see every [repair] request as an opportunity to optimize the instrumentation and equipment used in research. Sustainability, in my mind, starts with the things we use every day. Well-maintained equipment increases the useful lifespan of that equipment [and] reduces the energy used in its operation.”
Frank is a recipient of the 1995 CWRU President’s Distinguished Service Award and formerly served in the U.S. Navy as a propulsion engineer.