UHCL Collaborates with Mayor’s Office

Students Promote the Houston Sustainability Program

JASMINE GASCAR
THE SIGNAL
Graduate and undergraduate students in Michael Brims’ video production classes are partnering with graduate students from Kathleen Garland’s seminar in sustainability class to create informational and promotional videos in support of a city of Houston sustainability project of their choice.

“Sustainability is based on a simple principle: Everything that we need for our survival and well-being depends, either directly or indirectly, on our natural environment,” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) states on its website (www.epa.gov).  “Sustainability creates and maintains the conditions under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony that permits fulfilling the social, economic and other requirements of present and future generations.”

In 2010, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced it would award nearly $100 million in grants to promote sustainable environments in 45 regional areas across the country. The city of Houston region was awarded $3.75 million of those grants to implement its own sustainability projects.

Part of the city’s initiative with these projects is to help raise awareness among its citizens and to inform them of the opportunities available to them to help make the city more sustainable on a daily basis. The city is also hoping to educate the public about the idea of sustainability itself, a term that is garnering national attention with the development of projects and collaborations like the video project with UHCL.

“Sustainability in our eyes is looking at how we can make environmental projects economical and equitable,” said Lisa Lin, sustainability manager for the Office of the Mayor. “This is important in helping sustain the city and making it more adaptable and resilient to change.”

Garland, lecturer in environmental management, said graduate students from her seminar in sustainability class are acting as the subject matter specialists and have provided some of the contact coordination while students in Brims’ video production and editing and single camera video production classes are acting as the technical specialists.

“The students are getting a chance to create stories that the public and student community will see,” Garland said. “They will actually get credit for this, so this will give them much more exposure to the real world than say a term paper, which only the instructor will see.”

Brims, an assistant professor of communication, approached Garland after the city of Houston decided to embed some of his own videos about the city’s sustainability projects on its website. He decided to engage his students into a similar project and researched sustainability courses at UHCL, which then led him to Garland.

“I love the interdisciplinary approach we are taking with this project,” Brims said. “It’s like in the real world where you have a team of different people with different angles, different expertise, all working on the same project. People learn to work together.”

Graduate student and project participant Jenelle Henry said her video project on the Rise of Mixed Use Developments in the Midtown/Houston Area was a real learning experience, not just in video production but in sustainability as well.

“I never knew anything about [sustainability] before this class,” said Henry, digital media studies major. “I’m still trying to wrap my head around the idea. Initially I thought it was about recycling, but this project has taught me it’s a lot more. It’s made me more aware of [sustainability] and will help me do my part to help the community.”

Lin said this collaboration with UHCL was the first of its kind. Her role was to provide a landscape of the projects that the city of Houston currently has ongoing for the students to choose from and make their own.

“We want [the students] to show and demonstrate the value of these sustainability projects and show that they are economically feasible and that some are fun in nature,” Lin said. “We are increasing our recreational green space while addressing issues like flood issues, so we hope that these videos will show that [sustainability] projects are an asset to the community and an improvement of the quality of life for the city.”

Garland is hoping this collaboration will create the opportunity to expand on future projects that include not only sustainability, but strategies for resilience as well.

“Sustainability is how you manage your internal systems and use of resources; resilience is how you plan to deal with external pressures like natural disasters, that sort of thing,” Garland said. “Resilience is a broader subject, but it includes sustainability; both are important and they tie together.”

The city of Houston is hoping that the partnership with UHCL will open doors for students and for future collaborations.

“We hope to help the next generation of employees be exposed to sustainability projects and what the city is doing,” Lin said. “Hopefully we will inspire students to explore the field of sustainability and to look for opportunities for employment [in sustainability] in the future.”

For more information on the city of Houston’s sustainability projects, visit: www.greenhoustontx.gov.

For more information or to view UHCL’s sustainability video projects, visit: http://uhclvideo.wordpress.com.