Center for Sustainability to Host Seminar Series

October 12, 2010

Georgia Southern University’s Center for Sustainability is hosting the Sustainability Seminar Series featuring guest speaker Thatcher Young at 7 p.m., October 19 in the Nessmith-Lane Continuing Education building. His lecture entitled, “The Evolution of Sustainable Events: Creating Systems and Symbiosis in Experiential Marketing,” will draw upon his responsibilities for internal and external sustainability strategy and operations as the sustainable brands director of the marketing firm ignition.

Sustainability promotes careful usage of our resources such as energy, fuel, and water, as well as cost-effective measures for travel and waste management. Young’s firm has partnered with worldwide events including Coca-Cola’s Olympic Torch Relays, the FIFA World Cup Trophy Tours and the Live Earth concert on these sustainability issues.  He designed and implemented the industry’s first Sustainable Event Management System, which streamlines these events, and the system was recently integrated into the United Nation Foundation’s “Nothing but Nets: Buzz Tour” to raise national awareness about malaria and its prevention. Young is also credited with the creation of the Sustainable Bottler Toolkit, which is an interactive web series showing the best practices of sustainability throughout Coca-Cola’s global bottler system.

“Thatcher is a rising sustainability star, and he gets people excited about living this way. His job with ignition is to make world events sustainable, such as the Olympics and the World Cup, and this is a great opportunity for our students to see sustainability on a global level,” said Lissa Leege, biology professor and director of the Center for Sustainability.

Seminars are presented three times per year, with the purpose of promoting and increasing public awareness of sustainability issues. Former guest lecturers have included actor and environmentalist Ed Begley, Jr. and Majora Carter, founder of Sustainable South Bronx, a non-profit that pioneered green-collar job training and placement systems.

Founded in 2008, the Center has spearheaded many action projects to increase awareness of sustainability issues, while at the same time involving the campus and the community. Funds for these projects are distributed by the Center through a $15,000 grant program. Last year, Georgia Southern teamed up with Georgia Power to re-lamp the entire campus with fluorescent light bulbs in all of the academic buildings. Other projects funded by the Center include a campus cycling program, in which all abandoned bikes on campus were collected at the end of the year, refurbished and then rented to students; and a new course called “Global Sustainability and Innovation,” an introduction to sustainability.  Outreach programs provided by the Center include the annual Sustainability Fair and the weekly Farmer’s Market in downtown Statesboro, Ga.