The Oberlin Environmental Dashboard project has recently received a grant for nearly $100,000 to expand their work in the Oberlin Public School system. Once fully implemented, the dashboard will provide citizens with real-time feedback on the consumption of water and electricity being consumed. Community members will also be able to see the water and electricity flows of residences, businesses and the city as a whole.

            One of the students working on the project, College senior Shane Clark, said that the project’s goal is to further integrate the concept of environmental sustainability within schools and to allow children to become agents of change.

“The basic idea is to give people immediate feedback on resource use, so they can see how their individual and community-wide decisions impact our consumption rates. On a deeper level, we are trying to help Oberlin residents gain a better understanding of the complex social, ecological and economic systems that shape our lives, and to develop a community identity around sustainability, Clark said.”

“ Sustainability is definitely a buzzword but part of our mission is to broaden people’s definition of the word sustainability, or really to create a new definition of the word based on the things that Oberlin residents value and hope to preserve. We want people to understand that they are already engaged in a lot of pro-environmental actions, even if they may not be thinking of it that way,” Clark said in an email to the Review.

            According to members of the project, the Dashboard is set up to be visually striking and simple to operate, allowing it to be accessible to all individuals. It consists of three main parts, the first being the building dashboards, which monitor inmdividual buildings on campus. The second component, the citywide dashboard, monitors resource consumption, weather patterns and the water quality of Plum Creek, and computes feedback on the town’s resource management as a whole. It also has a “Community Voices” section, which acts as a combination of images and quotes from local students, business owners and volunteers. This section’s goal is to celebrate and acknowledge pro-environmental thought and action in Oberlin.

            Members of the Environmental Dashboard project claim that the grant is an opportunity to expand these initiatives and project them onto other public schools in Oberlin. Professor of Environmental Studies and Biology John Petersen noted that an important aspect of the grant is that it was awarded by the State Farm’s Youth Advisory Board, which is itself comprised of college students.

 “What is most unusual about this granting agency is that the granting officers — the people who actually review the grant proposals and decide what projects will be funded — are all college students. So the fact that young people decided to award the Environmental Dashboard project was a real vote of confidence from this generation regarding its potential to affect change,” said Petersen.

Members of the Oberlin Environmental Dashboard stated that they want to see this change implemented in other areas in the community as well. According to their website, the project’s goal is to expand to all 33 residences and 14 businesses in the Sustainable Community Associates East College Street buildings.

“Our goal is to represent and target the whole community, so we hope to have displays in all sub-communities within Oberlin.”

In particular, some of these sub-communities include places like Kendal or the new fire station,” said Aaron Kozloff, a recent graduate and the current project manager for the Environmental Dashboard.

The project also looks to expand outside of the Oberlin community. While the dashboard component that gives feedback on an individual building is already used nationwide, members of the Oberlin Environmental Dashboard hope to roll out their three-components system in additional communities.

“Faculty and students working on this project have given dozens of talks at professional conferences in the last several years about Environmental Dashboard. The organizations that have funded the work all recognize that what we are doing here in Oberlin has the potential to be a replicable model for other communities,” Petersen said.

“Our goal has always been to develop a technology and an approach that can be replicated throughout the Great Lakes region and beyond. We have talked to a lot of very interested folks from other communities. However, we are still developing several components of it, so it is not exactly a plug and play approach for other communities yet. In the next couple of years we plan to work with teachers in Oberlin to integrate dashboards into the various parts of the public school curriculum,” Petersen said.

The dashboards can currently be viewed in Slow Train Cafe, Prospect Elementary, the Oberlin Public Library and the AJLC.