The Center for Environmental and Urban Studies Building (CEUS) located at Santa Monica College. A model of green design, the building features solar tubes tubs that provide natural light year round, desks made from sunflower seed shells, and furnitu… — The Center for Environmental and Urban Studies Building (CEUS) located at Santa Monica College. A model of green design, the building features solar tubes tubs that provide natural light year round, desks made from sunflower seed shells, and furniture upholstery made from recycled water bottles. (Carolyn Burt / The Corsair)

For over two decades Santa Monica College (SMC) has provided it’s students with an experience known as the Student Sustainability Workshop, hosted by the Sustainable Works program on campus.

Each semester students sign up to partake in the 8 week, student-led seminar. It’s an opportunity for students to receive extra credit for their classes while also getting involved on campus extracurricularly.

SMC prides itself on this workshop, as it is the only college to offer such a program and at no extra cost to students. The eight week program (which will be seven this semester in order to prepare for its new online-via-Zoom class structure) focuses on different topics of sustainability each week. One week is water, another energy, then waste, shopping, chemicals, transportation, and food. The workshop, which is located at the Center for Environmental and Urban Studies building, keeps students informed about environmental issues that are happening on both a global and local level.

The program is led by student volunteers who have completed the workshop and want to help educate fellow students on how they can make more conscious decisions to reduce their carbon footprint.

Natalie Perez-Regalado, the Student Greening Program Coordinator and Zero Waste Associate for Sustainable Works at SMC, is particularly attached to the program as she took it herself when she was a student at SMC for extra credit for her Psych 1 class.

“It blew my mind, I came from a small Arizona town, I had never said the words sustainability in my whole life” says Perez-Regalado who went on to become one of the student leaders and teach the program for her next three semesters at SMC, “I changed my major when I transferred because of it, it’s really special for me to be able to come back full circle and run the program that completely changed me.”

Students who lead the workshop share the same enthusiasm as Perez-Regalado when it comes to the importance of the workshop, but what brings first-timers to the workshops is their professor offering it as an extra credit option for their class. Some of the student leaders admit that they didn’t have much of an interest in sustainability prior to enrolling in the workshop but have been so impacted that it resulted in them changing their majors. Such is the case with Cherelle Patrick, an Environmental Science major who will be teaching the program for her fourth time this semester.

Patrick believes it's the collaborative aspect of each class, and its basis interactive discussion instead of lectures, that is most beneficial to students. “The workshops give students a lot of information, but the structure of the workshops and the discussions that arise make the learning process fun.”

Shoshana Brustin and Iris Bredehoft share a laugh during their student leader training workshop on March 8, 2020. (Carolyn Burt / The Corsair)

The student leaders are also very aware of how overwhelming the topic of sustainability might seem to those who aren’t familiar with it. Still, they advocate for the program and it’s ability to help break sustainability down in a way that makes it accessible for anyone to make environmentally friendly choices.

“There’s a lot of valuable information that you don’t get on the daily if you’re not a sustainability major. There’s so many little things you can be doing to change your habits,” says SMC film major Shoshana Brustin. Simple things like taking shorter showers... not driving as much, taking the bus whenever I can, trying to reduce my single use plastics.”

Iris Bredehoft, who changed her major from Fashion to Environmental Studies, understands the intimidation behind green-related terms saying, “I think people get scared when they hear about sustainability and climate change… [but] this workshop is really good at breaking it down.”

Each class, students are tasked with completing action items. These are usually adjustments they can make in their own lives, such as researching the chemicals on different hygiene products they use and switching them out for cleaner ones, or changing out their lightbulbs for LEDs. “They’re so easy to put into your life and to help the environment,” says Bredehoft. “People get more comfortable around it and feel that they can actually participate and get on top of it.”

The goal of the program is not to get everyone who takes it to change their major to something in the environmental science field, though that does happen. The aim of the program is rather to better educate students so they can take what they’ve learned and better apply it to their own majors, careers, and lives.

In the end, it is much more than just an extra credit opportunity that the Sustainable Workshop offers SMC students. “What they can truly gain is a better understanding of these environmental issues and the empowerment that’s coming with that,” says Perez-Regalado. “We want to give some of that feeling back to the students that they do have an impact of what’s going on, that they can make that change.”

For more information on the workshop or how to sign up, students can visit http://www.sustainableworks.org/ or contact Natalie Perez-Regalado at natalie@sustainableworks.org.