Environmental Events

Earth Week

Earth Week, which is held the week prior to Earth Day, is organized in a collaborative effort with The Farm, student groups and the Environmental Stewardship Council. Each day there a different green initiative is highlighted and community members are encouraged to participate. Past green initiatives that have been highlighted include the use of reusable to-go containers, reusable travel mugs and water bottles, Meatless Monday, and Campus/The Farm clean up efforts. Additional events like Green Bingo and a Trashion Show are also held to increase sustainability awareness and initiatives. Participants in these events are eligible to win various raffle and daily prizes, as well as Earth Week t-shirts. 

Waterfest

Waterfest is sponsored and organized by Activism Club and features games, performances, and demonstrations by multiple student groups on campus, educating the Stonehill community about the privatization of water and generating awareness about other global water issues.

Stop the Drop

Sponsored by Residence Life and as a part of an ongoing effort to reduce water usage on campus, residence halls partake in the Stop the Drop campaign where they compete against one another to see which hall can conserve the most water. Overall, in Stop the Drop 2013, students cut usage by 12% with the winning reshall O’Hara Hall cutting usage by an astounding 32%.

Sustainability Fair

The Sustainability fair is a campus wide event held on the quad (weather permitting) and organized by Students for Environmental Action. The sustainability fair occurs once a semester and features student groups, class projects, department groups, and vendors associated with the college that are working to promote and incorporate sustainability on campus. Frequent vendors include Ben and Jerry’s, Stonyfield, and the band Melodeego that performs using a bike powered sound system that requires students to pedal to power their performance.

Jamnesty

Jamnesty is an annual, spring, outdoor music festival for social justice. The event includes performances by students and outside bands, and dozens of clubs and vendors supporting various social and environmental justice issues. Jamnesty was created by Hailey Chalhoub (’13) in 2010 and continues to grow into a popular event and a huge success year after year.

“Grab the Green” week

Grab the Green was a campaign led by a group of students to encourage their fellow students to use reusable to-go containers, instead of plastic, disposable ones. During “Grab the Green” week there were no disposable to-go containers available, instead reusable to-go containers were provided and given to students to use.

Furniture Fair

Each Fall ENACTUS organizes and facilitates a furniture fair where unwanted residence hall items from the previous year are collected and resold to incoming students. The furniture fair eliminates disposal and maintenance costs as well as provides freshman with affordable alternatives. All the proceeds from the fair and remaining furniture after the event go to My Brother’s Keeper, a neighboring food pantry that redistributes and delivers the donated furnishings.

Recyclemania

In the spring of 2013, Stonehill began participating in Recyclemania, which is an 8 week program of friendly competition between colleges and universities to promote waste reduction through recycling programs on campus. As of the 2017 competition, the campus recycling rate was 19.85%.