On March 15, the Office of Sustainability will launch Synergies, a biannual online publication.
Synergies is a natural extension of what the Office of Sustainability was created to do – engage the Charleston community. By focusing energy on the College, there have been advances in campus sustainability. Students have led the way in generating energy, waste, water, and cost savings for our campus, creating partnerships and relationships, and exploring our identity as community members and citizens. Now, our students are again leading the way forward to extend our sustainability community beyond campus boundaries. We have an immense opportunity to capture the energy and expertise of everyone in our community and to build something that is much greater than the sum. Our students are creating synergies to face the challenges of tomorrow.
Building sustainable communities requires communication and interconnectedness; by engaging in difficult conversations and sharing with one another our experiences, aspirations, setbacks, and successes, diverse members of our community can accomplish far more than could be accomplished alone. This is synergy. While centered at the College and driven by students, Synergies will reach across boundaries to facilitate this sort of connection that is necessary for a sustainable future. The purpose is to grow synergies in Charleston, around the Lowcountry, and throughout the region.
Synergies will contain a variety of content topics and formats. Topics will run the gamut of sustainability issues in our region and bring in a variety of perspectives from the community. The Office of Sustainability is interested in interactions between local restaurants, Lowcountry farms, and regional labor. The Office wants to know what sustainability means to artists, engineers, and to the tourism industry. Most of all, readers will be given boundless opportunities to further discuss, explore, ruminate, collaborate, and create change.
The publication will contain four general formats:
1. Articles will cover our hard stories and will cover current events and policy, scholarly research, and the like.
2. Features will be comprised of shorter pieces generally centered around various perspectives on a theme and really aiming to show, rather than just tell, about sustainability.
3. The Opinions section will hone in on individual voices regarding specific topics and will often serve as a jumping off point for more in depth explorations.
4. Expressions will be a wonderfully free-form section that allows artists from around the region to communicate sustainability in creative ways.
Synergies will be a biannual publication released in March and October. Issues will be tied together throughout the year by posting on the Synergies Blog, facilitating online discussions and debates pertaining to current and future content, and running online competitions that all serve to build a real community around regional sustainability.