McCormick sophomore Katrina Kuntz spent most of her weekends in Fall Quarter volunteering with her fellow Green House residents at ecosystems around Evanston, getting her hands dirty and pulling invasive plants out of the ground.

Kuntz is the design chair at Green House, a special interest on-campus housing unit. While the house has an environmentalism theme, a student executive board and a constitution, it is not recognized as a residential college. It does not have faculty-in-residences, cannot host joint events with other residential colleges and lacks other residential college privileges. 

Because of these challenges, Weinberg sophomore Julian Zea, Green House’s president, created a petition to convert the house to a residential college. He said he plans to meet with a residential housing representative next week to discuss next steps. 

“In our current state, we don’t believe that we have the publicity, the visibility or the community at our disposal to actually spread awareness (and) cooperation concerning environmentalism within the student body,” Zea said. “By becoming a residential college, we become a part of a larger community … that would give us the means and the stronger connections to spread environmentalism to other housing units.” 

Green House promotes sustainability around campus through two main programs: environmental education and composting. During Fall Quarter, Zea said Green House started a new composting initiative which aims to collect food scraps and other compostable items. He said the four bins are “filled to the brim” with compost each week. 

Zea added he wants to work with other residential colleges to implement more sustainability programs like the compost initiative. He said this could help reduce food waste across campus and create a larger impact. 

“The repositories are very small, but everyone contributes to it,” Zea said. “Just doing math here, if I got to take off four buckets once a week, that’s four buckets over the course of how many months now, there’s so much food that has been saved.” 

McCormick freshman Annie Ho, a Green House resident, said they think food waste is a big sustainability issue at NU. 

They said while they hope more food can be composted or donated by expanding Green House’s outreach, it’s ultimately NU’s responsibility to promote sustainability across campus. 

“I obviously turn off my lights and conserve energy,” Ho said. “(But) I feel my focus is more towards trying to get Northwestern itself to be more sustainable … working at a bigger scale rather than just as individuals.” 

Kuntz agreed NU needs to do a better job promoting sustainable efforts. She said NU can do this by granting Green House more visibility, as she wasn’t aware it existed until the end of last year. Because the house isn’t defined as a residential hall or a residential college, it’s much more difficult to find when looking at on-campus housing, Kuntz said. 

The sense of community is strong at the Green House, Kuntz said. She said the community is open to discussing difficult topics, like climate anxiety, which she has struggled with since learning about global warming in middle school. She said Green House’s mission provides comfort, something she hopes to expand to other residential spaces on campus. 

“It’s really important to have active spaces where you’re able to work towards a sustainable cause so that you don’t get lost in all the hopelessness,” Kuntz said. 

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: @joannah_11

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