Summer 2007 Issue
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Feature Article:
Announcing the EPA's P3
(People, Prosperity, and
the Planet) Award for
Sustainability: A Student
Design Competition
Community Colleges Encouraged to Apply
Now in its fourth year, the EPA’s P3 award program is looking for new college teams to apply for its $10,000 award.
Applications will be accepted August through December 2007
How can you help your community college students channel their energy toward helping the planet? The Environmental Protection Agency’s P3 (People, Prosperity, and the Planet) Award–-a student design competition for sustainability--is one way to encourage their creativity.
As part of EPA’s ongoing efforts to make colleges and universities aware of this exciting and successful program, EPA will participate in ICCD’s conference “Sustainability for Community Colleges: Curriculum, Culture, Conservation” August 5-8, 2007, at Cornell University to present the details of the award program to community college administrators.
The presenter, George Gray, assistant administrator in EPA’s Office of Research and Development, believes that “community colleges--with their closely-knit and diverse student bodies–can make unique contributions to the field of sustainable design while using the EPA’s P3 program to infuse sustainability principles into their curricula.”
EPA’s P3 program awards grants to teams of students, along with their faculty advisors, to design and develop sustainability projects in water, energy, agriculture, materials and chemicals, information technology or the built environment. These student-led projects also include a requirement for the integration of sustainability into higher education curricula. Students research, develop and design scientific, technical and policy solutions to sustainability challenges that help achieve the mutual goals of economic prosperity while providing a higher quality of life and protecting the planet. Teams also compete for additional funding in a second “phase” to implement their designs or move them to the marketplace. The national competition and award have already spun off several successful businesses and helped many people around the world.
For example, a student team (left)
from Albion College, a private four-year college in Albion, Michigan, competed in 2007 for the P3 Award. The team generated electricity using their campus’ exercise equipment “to educate college students on energy conservation and consumption,” according to their project summary. “Students will pledge to consume (on a given appliance of their choice) for the weekend only as much energy as they produced exercising the prior week.” Other winning projects are described on the EPA P3 Web site.
Applications for Phase I of the P3 program will be accepted in the fall of 2007. The $10,000 awards will be announced in the autumn 2008 semester.
Winners of Phase II of the award receive additional funding up to $75,000 to further develop the team’s designs, implement the projects in the field, and move them to the marketplace. These Phase II awards 
will be announced in spring 2009 immediately following the National Sustainable Design Expo on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. (photo, left). The awards are based on written project summaries and student presentations made at the Expo.
Several other organizations independent of the EPA offer awards (cash or in-kind services) to P3 teams at the Expo.
For more information about the P3 awards, visit their Web site, or contact Cynthia Nolt-Helms, at EPA’s Office of Research and Development, at 202-343-9693, or by email.
For more information about ICCD’s August 5-8, 2007, conference “Sustainability for Community Colleges: Curriculum, Culture, Conservation” at Cornell University, click here or email Patrick Feely at iccd@cornell.edu.
Other articles in the Summer 2007 issue of Gravitas:
"Why are Community Colleges So Slow to Jump on the Fundraising Bandwagon?"
Article by Donald C. Summers; first appeared
in the Chronicle of Higher Education
Why spend three days in the height of summer at ICCD's Leadership Issues conference? Comments from past program participants.
See what these community college presidents,
administrators, faculty and trustees have to say.
ICCD's Applied Research Grants are available for 2007-08.
