The green gals of Vernon Street
July 1, 2008

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The busy section of Vernon Street that spools out between the hospital and the College tours through a beautiful medley of architecture and tended greenery. Mirrored in the windows of passing cars, styled structures of Tudor, Colonial and Greek Revival slide by, their sentries of oak, cedar, pine and maple wave unevenly in the breeze.

Cruising east, past a great stand of magnolias, past the president’s home, you probably wouldn’t notice the long, narrow bungalow on the right that squats inconspicuously
a stone’s throw from the road. But the little wooden house has a character all her own, and for the past year a green minded set of students has brought her a wellspring of attention.

Conjuring a theme
It began as a brainstorming session. Four young women—LeeAnn Brooks ’08, Lisa Burgee ’09, Jane Holik ’08 and Erica Robinson ’08—gathered together on a spring day in 2007 to strategize their way into one of the College’s theme houses. The school had announced a new initiative that would allow four students to band together to live in one of four College rental homes during the upcoming year, but each house needed to have a central motif.

The quartet batted around several ideas, none completely satisfactory, until Jane mentioned that she had recently heard President Gulley give a talk on the
school’s emphasis on sustainability. That chipped off a spark. They all chimed in—it seemed each of them had a personal interest in the topic. The women quickly crafted a mission statement: Focusing to bring a sustainable way of life to our campus and community through ecological means. Now all they needed was a name.

Captain Planet, the first moniker the new group came up with, was like the early 90s cartoon that inspired it—kind of cheesy, a little juvenile. But three of the four young women huddled together that day preferred it to Erica’s suggestion—Gang Green—which they thought was kind of gross, a little disgusting.

“When I threw out the words ‘Gang Green,’ that was shot down almost immediately, and I was like, darn,” Erica remembers.

When the group presented the sustainability theme to Dean of Students Dr. Jack Slay, he liked the idea very much, but to the chagrin of most of the group, he also liked the gross but catchy appellation Erica had come up with. In short order, their theme was approved, and they were given the brand Gang Green.

Making plans
Over the summer, as part of their preparations to move into the house in the fall, the women spent a chunk of their time sending out letters to local companies and businesses asking for donations of money or energy-efficient appliances. Despite the effort, when the time came to tally their donations, the only item on the ledger was a $100 gift
from the headquarters of National, the company that runs the College’s Campus Services.

“It was kind of disappointing,” Lee-Ann says. “We thought we would get more of a response.” But just as things began to look bleak on the contribution front, Campus Services Director Bob Vitale pulled out a skein of contacts and began pulling strings.

From Linc Mechanical, he secured a tankless water heater and then convinced Bob Maddox of Maddox Service Company to donate his time to install it. From Interstate Electric, Vitale procured a donation of light fixtures and compact florescent bulbs. He salvaged a low flow toilet from a razed home and had his crew install new water-saving aerators on the bungalow’s faucets.

When Jane’s parents donated five ceiling fans to the project, it was Vitale and National who installed them.

“Bob worked wonders,” Erica says. “He got a lot of stuff donated for us.”

Jane agrees. “National has been very helpful, and if we ever needed anything, they’ve been right there.”

The sustainable life
Fall semester arrived and the Gang Green girls (as they were now called) began to live their theme.

“Our plan was to do a lot of little things that we hoped would add up,” LeeAnn says.

To conserve energy, they turned off the air conditioning, raised the windows and turned on the fans during the dog days of September. When the leaves began to turn and winter tide rolled in, they kept the heat at 64 degrees during the day.

They took short showers, used bath water to douse thirsty plants and turned off the faucet while cleaning their teeth. They unplugged appliances not in use, occasionally used the clothesline out back to dry their apparel (weather permitting) and turned out lights when leaving a room—a practice Erica found particularly prepossessing.

“I’ve been labeled the light Nazi,” she says. “If there’s a light on in the room, I’ll cut it off if nobody’s in there, but it
doesn’t happen often.”

The young women also started a compost pile in their backyard, and they were steadfast in their efforts to recycle everything they possibly could.

“Shopping at the Farmer’s Market is another thing we tried to do,” Lee-Ann says. “It might not be 100 percent organic, but it’s local food so the cost of transporting is less.”

To help them manage the sustainable lifestyle, they broke household chores down into four categories, which they switched out every couple of weeks. They also convened monthly meetings to review how things were going and to make improvements.

Once they got all the kinks hammered out, life inside the house was good … but outside 1009 Vernon Street, the Gang Green girls were being stretched thin as a soap bubble.

Answering the call
Looking back over their experience, all the Gang Green members say that the most demanding part of their year in the house was finding the time to satisfy all the external requests that buzzed their way.

“Time management was the hardest thing for me,” says Jane, who also served as president of the SGA this past year. “I never expected to spend so much time doing everything we’ve been asked to do.”

Says LeeAnn, “We got a lot more attention than I ever thought we would get. There was a month there that we were constantly going to different places or speaking to different groups.”

Over the course of the year, Gang Green spoke to the Rotary Club, the Board of Trustees’ spouses and Kappa Delta sorority. They also served on the Sustainability Council and worked with FRISBEE (Friendly Recycling Initiative by Students Becoming Environmentally Empowered).

In the fall and spring they hosted well-attended open houses. However, preparing for the first one was like a round of Beat the Clock.

“We pulled an all-nighter on the first open house,” Jane says. “We were all up until 5 a.m. trying to get the house ready, and it wasn’t just cleaning. We wrote up sustainability facts and put them everywhere—on appliances, on the windows, so people would walk through and be taught about what they could do in very easy, simple
ways.”

Erica agrees that all the external requests were at times a bit of an imposition, but, she believes, there was a reward for the effort.

“We didn’t sign up for all the extra stuff ,” she says. “We were just going to have a theme house and live in it.

“I haven’t always wanted to do everything that we’ve been asked to do, but we’ve done it, and in the end I’ve been thankful we’ve done it because we’ve learned more from it and gotten stronger and grown. So I’m thankful for all the extra things we ended up doing.”

Did it work?
As the year ticked down, the Gang Green team members refected on their time in the College’s first sustainability themed home and judged the merits of their efforts.

“I think we’ve definitely made an impact,” Erica says. “We’re known on campus as the Gang Green girls, and people know what we stand for. And I think it’s good that we initiated the green theme.”

LeeAnn says that she measured the year’s success on more of an individual level.

“Personally, I’ve learned a lot—we’ve had to do research and get outside information,” she says. “It’s been a positive thing for me because it’s been challenging, and with challenges, not only do you learn even more about your own character, but you grow as an individual. And it’s been fun to do this with three other girls.”

Jane is most certain that the yearlong experiment has yielded positive results.

“I think it’s been a great success,” she says. “We know it’s been a success from the way people stop us and ask how it’s going and from the way we’ve been asked to participate in so many things. Students ask us about it, faculty ask us about it. I think it was a good starter for the theme house project to get the ball rolling.” So from a PR standpoint, there seems to be agreement regarding Gang Green’s accomplishments. But what about an empirical assessment? Did the team’s conservation efforts actually yield any measurable results? For the answer to this question, we checked with Bob Vitale.

According to Vitale, the 1,825 square foot bungalow was built in 1920 during an era when insulation was not a priority.

“It was built back in the old days when they had plaster lath walls with not much behind them,” he says. He also pointed out that the appliances and air conditioning are of an older, more energy-consuming variety.

Even so, it appears the women did well. The year before Gang Green moved in, there were only two people living in the house and the Energy Star rating was 4.2, which means 42 percent of U.S. homes used more energy than the Vernon Street house. During the green team’s year, the rating went up to 4.8, meaning 48 percent of U.S. homes used more
energy. Not bad—there were twice the number of people living in the home, yet they consumed measurably less energy.

“So when you consider all the variables, it looks like they did a pretty good job,” Vitale says.

And the sustainability theme will roll on into 2009 as well, according to Dean Slay.

“We’ve already selected next year’s group, and it’s another group of four young women who have proposed another sustainability theme.”

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