The SES network
The School of Earth & Sustainability is a pan-campus network of students, scholars, scientists, and innovators. It runs across departments, colleges, academic and certificate programs, campus operations, and partner organizations throughout western Massachusetts and the Commonwealth. It includes faculty who teach and research, staff who lead university operations, and students who move between the groups, breaking down silos and traditional boundaries of practice.
What the School provides is the connective tissue our network requires and no single department can maintain. Our school invites university members and leaders to affiliation with our SES network, connecting our community in meaningful ways with communications and coordination through student success that crosses college lines, applied student placements built on a learning contract between the student and the supervisor, and annual reporting.
That work is also anchored in the land grant mission. Knowledge held here is owed back to the region around it, and student success is where the commitment is activated each year with growing systems of collaboration, plugging in partners and companion programming.
Affiliation is open to anyone at the university whose teaching, research, or practice carries a sustainability purpose, whether or not their department sits inside the School. To read more about how the School is organized, see About SES. For regional and organizational partnership, see Partner With Us and Affiliated Organizations.
SES Pan-campus Advisory Council
Sustainability at UMass does not sit in one department. The School of Earth & Sustainability is updating its governance structure to engage leadership across the university around shared commitment to sustainability and the its land grant mission.
New this academic year, the SES Pan-campus Advisory Council (PAC) brings representation from the SES member departments, from across the colleges, from campus operations, and from students. It is the most significant structural evolution for SES since its establishment in 2016. The council came out of the Sustainability Strategy Working Group, a cross-campus process formed at the request of campus leaders in 2021 and funded by the Provost's Office from 2022. Forty-five faculty and staff from every college, UMass Libraries, and UMass Extension took part across two phases, with students engaged as thought leaders and coordination with university-level staff and campus operations. Its target framework was an expanded School with pan-campus reach and services across education, research, and engagement. This council is that framework taking structural form.
Representation
PAC includes representation from the critical units addressing sustainability at the university, including the departments, academic programs, colleges, operations, extension, research, and students. SES is now building student representation into our advisory governance structure with seats reserved for two undergraduate students and two graduate students to start.
Council representatives are listed below as they are filled. If you are interested in representation on the council, or in affiliating with the School of Earth & Sustainability, contact Rob DeConto or Darci Connor Maresca.
Role
What the council advises on. The council’s charge is direction, impact, and scale. It advises SES on which initiatives to take on, what those initiatives should be held accountable for, and how far they should reach. It examines the shared space where research, education, and engagement meet, and asks whether the work needs to be integrated or better connected. Student success is a central focus of SES operations with staff support and program support. The council’s role is to bolster those programs and help support the systems SES is building to offer cross-departmental programing that provides missing sustainability programming so that students learn, contribute, and graduate into meaningful careers.
The council is deliberately forward-looking, supporting the network via scaling impact and investment. It exists to ask what this campus should be able to do in five years and what it will take to get there. It does not manage SES programs, staffing, budgets, partnerships, or day-to-day operations. The SES team and its directors deliver operations. PAC works alongside SES, providing critical perspective and advice on emerging opportunities and helping to scale impact for our SES network, especially related to programs that develop new research collaborations.
Council representatives (AY26-27)
Representatives serve from the School of Earth & Sustainability member departments, from across the colleges, from campus operations, and from the student body. Student seats are being filled this fall.
