My name is Skyler, and I have been on quite the journey in the past few years. After studying Sustainable Community Development in North Carolina, I headed out West for the opportunity to work short term with the City of Bozeman’s Water Conservation Division. After this impactful experience, I was longing to return home to Maine and contribute to the amazing climate work I was seeing taking place from afar. I began looking for a climate action-oriented opportunity and was lucky enough to join the Campus Climate Action Corps as a Climate Action Leader AmeriCorps Member in January of 2024.
I am serving at Southern Maine Community College (SMCC), a hop, skip and a jump up the coast from my hometown, although I had surprisingly never been there before. At any spot on campus you can smell saltwater and feel how close the ocean is, just feet away. Although tasked with many climate-oriented goals and excited to hit the ground running, I realized that the most important thing I needed to do was take time to learn from the SMCC community, identify where I was needed most, and work to elevate and support the initiatives that people were already doing. I would argue that it takes years to truly become a part of a community and understand how it operates, but SMCC has made it easier than most to do so. I am a strong believer in allowing needs to inform action taken, and that principle has truly guided the direction of my efforts at SMCC.
I began by asset-mapping the campus. This is an ongoing process filled with meaningful conversations, new connections, questions, and answers. The goal was to take inventory of the strengths, resources and opportunities within the SMCC community. Doing so has highlighted the diverse resources that are already available here, such as infrastructure, relationships, initiatives, 
and more. Unlike many colleges and universities, there was not a one-stop-shop for me to find where sustainability existed at SMCC. Through this process I’ve identified where sustainability lies throughout the community, and have created a mock website for the campus to pull information from and add to their own website in a new sustainability section. As someone who went to school for sustainable development, the sustainability pages of various campuses were the first place I looked to determine where I wanted to go to school. This felt necessary to connect the initiatives already taking place and put that information in an accessible format for incoming students, current students, faculty, staff and community members.
That process has helped identify opportunities for collaboration, growth and innovation into the future. I see the opportunities and am aiming to bring more to life through the creation of a Sustainability Advisory Committee. Without a sustainability director or office of sustainability, I hope that by connecting a group of faculty and staff, whoever is next in my position can offer support for what the community aims to achieve in the future.
My time so far at SMCC has opened my eyes to the many effects of climate change on the coast of Maine. Not only is the Gulf of Maine warming faster than 99% of the global ocean, but the effects of sea level rise amidst increasing severity of storms is evident on campus and within the surrounding community every day. I had originally thought that a native-planting initiative and invasive species clean up would work well within the SMCC community to support the local ecosystem, but after multiple intense January storms, I saw firsthand how a well-intentioned project like that could so quickly be ruined by the effects of climate change on the coast. Erosion and coastline management must come first to build resilience and protect other initiatives taking place so close to the ocean here. Although this is not a project I can take on myself or complete during my service term, offering support through public awareness, starting conversations about management on campus, documenting the effects of erosion, and ensuring collaboration with the City of South Portland seems to be some of the best ways I can support erosion mitigation, so that is the route I have taken.
As I began brainstorming an energy efficiency project to take place on campus, I realized that a greenhouse gas inventory was necessary to offer an overview to the campus community on where their emissions were coming from and help determine what the most effective opportunities are to decrease their greenhouse gas emissions. With support from various stakeholders, I have begun carbon footprinting training through the University of New Hampshire, and am utilizing SIMAP, a carbon and nitrogen accounting platform utilized by hundreds of colleges, to create the first greenhouse gas inventory ever completed for SMCC. I am working to create a system of data discovery and management that can easily be replicated so this inventory can be completed yearly, targets set, and projects tracked.
I had initially wanted to host a green career fair on campus, but the needs of students have led me in a different direction. As a campus with many virtual students, I discovered that an in-person career fair was not the most effective way to connect students to green organizations and opportunities. I am currently identifying green-focused career avenues within our region and helping to recruit organizations to join the campus’ career platform.
I am extremely grateful for all I have learned so far and continue to learn throughout this opportunity. By allowing the needs here to inform what I do, I hope my efforts to create these types of sustainability foundations will have a lasting impact at SMCC and support collaborative action into the future.