The Community Share program seeks to promote environmental sustainability through multi-generational, community and college collaborative education and programming. We are working with the Student Environmental Action Coalition, sharing an intern with Hiram Christian Church, and seeking to work more closely with the Center for the Study of Nature and Society. Our current programs include:

• The community composting program promotes the benefits of composting through community workshops and service opportunities. At the college our goal is to continue composting a percentage of the College’s food waste, and compost all dinning and co-op food waste by winter 2009
• Our reusing programs promote the reuse of materials ordinarily discarded or under-utilized, to decrease environmental and social impacts, by creating systems to capture the college’s waste stream of usable goods, such as clothing, furniture, construction materials, etc… and redistribute those goods (via Habitat Restore, SEAC Sale, Free Store) to those in “need”.
• “Hey, that’s not garbage—that’s unusual recycling!” seeks to educate the community to items that can be appropriately recycled (some of which do great harm when disposed of in landfills) such as tires, paint, electronics, cell phones, synthetic carpet, etc… The goal of the program is to create awareness and systems for regular collection and centralized transport of recyclables to the Portage County Recycling Center.

• The Yellow Bike program, coordinated by the Student Environmental Action Coalition, promotes the use of bicycling on campus as an alternative to fossil fuel consumption. Using donated and “junked bikes” students and community member learn how to maintain and fix bikes, and all community members have access to bikes in the village free of charge.
• Energy conservation is a future goal for our program. We would like to begin offering energy audits in the community, along with working with the college to creatively address energy conservation on campus as well.
• We are beginning to promote Local and organic food systems at Hiram College and in the community by providing resources as to how and where to find local and organic foods in season; working with the Stone Soup Coop to create a root cellar and procure local foods in season; and looking toward working with AVI to increase the percentage of local foods consumed in our dining halls as they have done at Kenyon College. We also have future goals of facilitating a community garden, and perhaps beginning a community supported agriculture program (CSA) that could produce food all-year-round, with limited inputs (fossil fuels), to our dinning services and community—livestock and particularly aquaponics (cultivating fish and vegetables in a aquatic system) are also strong considerations which are currently being perused.

This year we kicked off a Fair Trade Program at Hiram College which sells Fair Trade (ethically produced and environmentally sustainable) clothing, hand-crafts and foods (coffer, tea, chocolate, etc...) and educates people to the reality of sweat-shops, at the College and area churches. We also held our first youth event for 40 teenagers at Camp Christian in Ohio and had a Fair Trade Talent show. We hope to expand next year to other area Churches, DOC camp programs, and community programs.