The Sustainability House at Barrett, the Honors College

The Sustainability House is a student-initiated, student-run project that works to build a strong living and learning community of students with a common interest in understanding and acting upon a broad range of sustainability-related issues. In the fall of 2009, approximately 200 students from a variety of disciplines and undergraduate levels will move into the Sustainability House, two connected residence halls that will be specially designed to meet the community’s needs in the new Barrett College complex. Solar panels, a grey water reuse system, an organic garden, an experimental green roof, and state-of-the-art energy use modeling are all being negotiated as extra features for the Sustainability House building. The student community will partner with administration, faculty, staff, and members of the greater community to examine their own role--both in a local and a global sense--in building a more sustainable world. Students will have the responsibility of learning to work together to establish a dynamic, shared vision of what a sustainable future means, and they will be supported by Barrett and the University to work toward achieving this goal both within and beyond the classroom.

A group of future Sustainability House residents is piloting their program in the Irish C residence hall at Barrett starting in the fall of 2008.