Graduate Certificate in Strategic Sustainability Leadership
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About the Program
Today, the largest and most well-known corporations in the world, e.g., Wal-Mart, Interface, Nike, Starbucks, Cummins Engine, Toro, Home Depot, IKEA, Ford, Toyota, Nissan, Electrolux, and General Electric, are aggressively integrating sustainability action plans into their operations. In order to do this, they are also looking upstream and asking the many local and regional small business suppliers in their value and supply chains to do the same. As a result, small and medium sized businesses, which provide the lion’s share of jobs in our region as well as nationally, find themselves scrambling to catch up in this changing environment. The problem is that in most cases small and medium businesses, manufacturers, and service providers do not have the expertise, personnel, or resources to set up the kind of robust sustainability education and training programs that their corporate clients are demanding of them.
This growing interest and demand for sustainability is not limited to business, but is now a driving factor in virtually every sector of our society and economy. Government (local, state, and federal), the not-for-profit sector, and the general public are also struggling to become more sustainable in the face of soaring energy costs and growing concerns about environmental degradation and global climate change.
The Graduate Certificate in Strategic Sustainability Leadership will give you the training and credentials to become a sustainability champion and help your business, not-for-profit, or governmental unit to take advantage of the newly emerging green economy opportunities for innovation and efficiency offered by leveraging the triple-bottom-line of people, prosperity and planet.
The Graduate Certificate in Strategic Sustainability Leadership will give you the training and credentials to become a sustainability champion and help your business, not-for-profit, or governmental unit to take advantage of the newly emerging green economy opportunities for innovation and efficiency offered by leveraging the triple-bottom-line of people, prosperity and planet.
The Certificate in Strategic Sustainability Leadership may be taken alone, or as part of the Master of Liberal Studies Degree.
All classes for the Certificate can be completed in the evening and within 15 months, including the summer session.
Graduates with a Certificate in Strategic Sustainability Leadership will be able to:
- Identify the foundational literacies and concepts of sustainability associated with understanding environment, economy and society and the relationships between them.
- Utilize interdisciplinary perspectives for learning and application of knowledge about sustainability.
- Employ a systems approach to sustainability that demonstrates holistic thinking, integration and complexity.
- Determine appropriateness and applicability of existing sustainability tools and frameworks, such as The Natural Step (TNS), LEED, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Biomimicry, Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), Energy Star, Cradle to Cradle.
- Use the competencies of innovation and apply them in the use of sustainability as a platform for innovation.
- Apply collaboration and leadership skills to foster sustainability teamwork.
- Practice transformative thinking to become an effective change agent.
- Demonstrate an ethical sensibility and capacity for hope, empathy, inspiration, and optimism.
- Employ skills of persuasion in a variety of ways (rhetoric and argument, media, public relations, political/community organizing).
- Formulate and implement sustainability action plans and solutions in real-life settings (household, workplace, organizations, and community) and through civic engagement.
Degree Requirements (15 cr.)
All courses are 3 credit hours, unless otherwise noted.
Core Courses
- SUST-S 501 Sustainability Strategies and Applications
- SUST-S 520 Sustainability and Innovation
Electives
Select two of the following:
- SUST-S 620 Sustainable Technologies and Alternative Energy
- SUST-S 630 Sustainable Food Systems
- SUST-S 660 Sustainability and the Built Environment
Capstone
- SUST-S 690 Sustainability Leadership Development and Planning