By: Wilson Ha
John Carroll University
2024-2025
Developing this project took many hours of brainstorming, meetings, developing, planning, and troubleshooting with my mentors, my peers, university offices, and student organizations. Often, a vision of an end goal can be an aspiration rather than something that is able to happen overnight, and there is a lot of work and changes that occur before that vision can be accomplished. For me, I wanted to see some sort of tangible action and change surrounding issues of sustainability occur before my time at the university ended. I’ve spent a large chunk of my collegiate career learning about the university’s views about this issue and the amount of effort it takes to make a change about something you want to see modified. From the start, I was very passionate about recycling on campus, and I felt that there had to be some sort of improvement, no matter what. And while it’s safe to say I didn’t completely accomplish everything in my vision, I attracted attention to these issues and helped to push along the first steps of change: creating a momentum that I think will be sustained for the next few years by the faculty, staff, and younger students in which I had the honor of working with throughout my time at John Carroll University. I am confident that my work on this project, combined with the university’s mission and devotion to Pope Francis’ Laudato Si proposal, will lead to further development of John Carroll University’s obligation to be more sustained and aware of environmental issues.