The Bursar's Office at Lehigh University is tucked away in the Alumni Memorial Building, where each day the employees work tirelessly to complete their duties and ensure the University has the funding necessary to operate. Recently, the office has been striving to be more efficient with their resources and processes. This summer, the Bursar's Office registered for Lehigh's Sustainable Office Program. The Sustainable Office Program is a program where individual offices or buildings can strive to set their own sustainability goals and make conscious changes to their space to help contribute to the Campus Sustainability Plan 2020. The Bursar's Office completed the four-step program this October and has been certified at the gold level.
Michelle Bloss is the Sustainable Office Program Representative for the Bursar's Office and took the lead in ensuring her office makes sustainable changes and sets achievable goals. She is no stranger to sustainability, as she regularly teaches "Leave No Trace" and "Reduce Reuse Recycle" as a scout leader. She discusses the Bursar's Office participation in the program as a "team-building exercise". Michelle explains, "This process was a way for us to learn more about sustainability as a group. We had a great time going over the list and discussing what items we were going to work on and which ones weren't feasible at this time. We worked hard together to adopt as many of the sustainable actions as we could and realized we were already doing a lot of the things on the list." The Bursar's Office regularly achieves 96 out of the 175 sustainable actions from the checklist, with their strongest category being Participation and Engagement.
The Bursar's Office went the extra mile and nominated another office within their building to join the program. Not only do they want to see improvements from within, but they also want to inspire other nearby offices to engage in the same sustainable practices as they are. While the Bursar's Office is on the road to a completely sustainable workplace, Michelle emphasizes the importance of constant improvement saying, "We still have some areas that we can improve on, but we made great strides towards our sustainability goals." If your office would like to join the movement and contribute to positive, sustainable change on Lehigh's campus, you can register here, or email sustainability@lehigh.edu to learn more.