FAQs

Any individual person who is interested in creating healthier and sustainable K-12 schools is welcome to join the Alliance's online community. Sustainability Coordinators, Students, Principals, Faculty, Facility Managers, Business Officers, Procurement Professionals, Administrators, School Staff, Parents, Volunteers, Non-profit Advocates, Conservationists, etc. are all welcome to join.
 

Green Schools Alliance is actively removing barriers for anyone who is interested in creating helathy and sustainable schools to get involved in the movement. Membership "used to be" only for schools or districts at an institutional level and required a leadership commitment. In 2017, the Alliance decided to restructure its membership offerings to allow anyone to join the online community to better support the individual sustainability champion. The school/district leadership commitment that used to be a prerequisite to membership has now been separated to better highlight the principals and superintendents taking the lead. Green Schools Alliance is no longer an organization that requires membership for program actvitity. Anyone can get involved!
 

Becoming a member of the online community is FREE to all.

 

We are an organization that focuses on K-12 school sustainability, but college-affiliated persons could become individual members of the online community if they want to help K-12 sustainability champions. For college and universities seeking to make their campuses more sustainable, the equivalent organization is AASHE, the Association for the Advanced of Sustainability in Higher Education.

 

The student club as an organization cannot "join" the Alliance, but the club can have a collaboration group in the community!  

Check out instructions and the leadership commitment letter template here. 

 

You can always remain an individual member of the online community, but make sure to update your email address for your personal account.

If you are an ADMINISTRATOR of the school's collaboration group, you need to give ADMINISTRATOR privileges to a new person. This new person has to be a member of the Alliance and the group, so invite them to become a member and to join your collaboration group. Then...

1. Go to your collaboration group and click on "Group Admin"
2. Click on the "Permissions" tab.
3. Under "Group Administrators", click the green "ADD" button.
4. Locate the member you wish to become a new ADMINISTRATOR. Click on their name and then click ADD. Their name should now show in the Group Administrators list. Check all the permission boxes so they can make changes to the group's page.
5. Click SAVE CHANGES at the bottom. You are done!

 

Please read our Blogger Guidelines and follow the directions at the bottom of the page.

 

No. But we have youth and professional leadership training events in the summer. We also maintain a presence at certain conferences throughout the year, such as the North American Association for Environmental Education Conference or the Green Schools Conference & Expo. Please check the calendar for a list of events or conferences.

 

Not at this time. The Alliance piloted the Educator Climate & Conservation Colloquium (Ec3) for sustainability champion leadership training in 2015 and 2016. To make the training more accesible to a larger number of people, we are working on developing online training modules from the content. Check out our professional development partners for teacher, and building operator trainings. 

 

Yes. Student Conservation Corps & Congress (Sc3) is our student leadership development program.

 

Through the GSA Purchasing Solution, schools and districts can get product research and analysis of sustainable products.

 

You can do this by becoming a vendor of the GSA Purchasing Solution or a Sponsor. Click on the links to learn more.  

 

No. At this moment our website is only available in English with the Google Translate widget available, but we are working on making our site multilingual over time to match our diversity.

 

No. The Alliance does not provide funding, but check out ideas for funding in the discussion groups under Financing and Funding or search the Resource Center.

 

School profiles are not available on the new site. The Alliance is redeveloping a new interactive reporting and roadmap system where schools can discover a sustainability roadmap and share what they are doing. On the current site, your school can be represented by a collaboration group with some details shared on the home page. The big difference form the old site is your school group is now an interactive space to work with your fellow co-conspirators at your school to plan your sustainability efforts. 

 

For schools that were on the old site, we copied the basic school details into your new collaboration group for you. If you want to copy more details from your old profile to your new group, you can access your old school profile through August 2017, but you must be a member of the Green Schools Alliance in order to see the access code. Our new reporting system, coming in 2017, will be replacing the old profile page checklist.

 

All of the resources live in the Resource Center, (including webinar listings, making the case papers, the Green Journal, video ocean, etc.). You can filter by topic, type of resource, or do a keyword search.

 

Blogs is now the place for announcements and stories, broken down into three sections: “news and updates,” “students,” and “school professionals.”

 

Ask the Experts is being refreshed and will debut again in 2018 with current and new experts within the Discussion Groups.

 

The Toolkit is being absorbed into the new reporting and roadmap system, coming in 2017. It will be a fully interactive tool for sustainability champions to understand what whole-school sustainability is and how to achieve it!

 

Featured Schools from the old website have turned into "Success Stories" found within the various Discussion Groups.