At the Sciencenter in Ithaca, NY, we have been on a crash course on sustainability for the past year. After the museum’s board decided to allocate 1% of our 2007 budget toward sustainability-related issues, during an all-staff meeting, we invited our staff and several volunteers to write down 2-3 things that we might do with our new funding.
We received dozens of ideas ranging from investing in alternative energy to buying green products to encouraging energy conservation to developing new exhibits and programs on sustainability. This short exercise yielded so many good ideas that we repeated it with both our board of trustees and our advisory board. We combined all the ideas on a spreadsheet with the number of times mentioned, proposed priorities as H-M-L, re-sorted, and brought the summary back to our staff for more discussion. This led to a set of prioritized marching orders, which we are now working on.
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2 comments:
What are Sciencenter's high-priority sustainability action items? And how were all the ideas prioritized?
Hi Wendy - will talk about some of this in the next few posts. The priorities were initially set by the standard ASTC "red-dot" or "Las Vegas" method that Roy Shaffer was so fond of.
We posted all the ideas up on easels and let staff vote by giving everyone a limited number of colored dots and letting them vote their dots as they wanted.
We then put the results back to the staff at the next monthly meeting and did some fine tuning of the list. Various people picked up on things they were particularly interested in, and some of those things are now moving forward. Other things were delegated to committees (planning for a solar power demo project went to Buildings & Grounds, for example).
It is a very de-centralized approach but is allowing many different people, from staff to board to volunteers, to get involved.
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