Green Bear Coalition is a registered student organization with a mission to practice and teach sustainability at UCA.
Senior Becca Chamoun, vice president of Green Bear Coalition and environmental science major, said, “Green Bear is a sustainability club on campus. We cover all realms of that. So whether you’re into thrifting your clothes or gardening, we kind of help foster an environment that’s going to give you resources to help you succeed in that way, connect you with faculty and staff that are going to help with that and then also getting them involved.”
Sophomore Samantha Brookman, Green Bear Coalition event planner and environmental science major, said, “We felt like a lot of people weren’t aware of what went into sustainability and what it was about. Because a lot of people know what conservation is, but they don’t realize how to intertwine conservation with actual human activity.”
Chamoun said, “It’s so important for UCA to have a sustainability club because it connects people in all different departments and shows how important it is to be sustainable, how challenging, but also how easy it is.”
Brookman said recycling isn’t always effective, so creating sustainable food sources and maintaining the environment is important.
“We grow food. I think currently, right now, we’ve got eggplants, tomatoes, funnily enough, we’re growing loofahs as well,” Brookman said. “We donate most of it to the food pantry here on campus. We sometimes do work with farmers markets and things like that to help donate and then whatever doesn’t get used we put back into our compost bin.”
Chamoun said Green Bear donated “150 pounds of produce” to the food pantry during the fall semester, which helps feed students and faculty.
The founder of Green Bear Coalition, Grant Williams, a former UCA graduate student, began the RSO to redo the Lewis Science Center atrium, which was formerly a “turtle or tortoise habitat,” Brookman said.
Chamoun said Williams is an “environmental nerd” who she met when she joined Green Bear Coalition at the end of her freshman year.
Chamoun said, “I started going to meetings and just really got involved. I really liked gardening. I didn’t realize how easy it was to garden. There are so many studies that show that your mental health is so much better with dirt underneath your fingernails.”
“I like to tell people that are coming in that it can be really frustrating living in a world that doesn’t acknowledge the climate crisis that we’re in or doesn’t really care about our natural world, and putting that frustration and that energy into growing food that feeds your peers and your faculty members,” Chamoun said.
Brookman said she joined when she was a freshman after seeing a flyer.
“I’ve met some of my closest friends in Green Bear,” Brookman said. “I didn’t join with a serious intent in mind. It was more so just to get involved on campus, to do something fun, and now I’m an officer in control of our events. It fell in my hands and I love it. I love being a part of that and feeling like it’s a part of something larger on campus.”
Chamoun said Green Bear Coalition has helped her get involved with research opportunities at UCA and has given her more “confidence.”
“I’m usually a follower, I love being a follower and I’m great at doing tasks that are given to me but being on the Green Bear board, I’ve gotten to do the delegating and leading, which has given me more confidence and pushed me out of my shell to grow,” Chamoun said.
Thirty interested students attended the Green Bear Coalition’s first meeting of the semester.
“I hope in time it’ll just get bigger. We don’t have a ton of people that come to our regular work days, our regular meetings, but that pollinator garden, I hope that we can get that gorgeous,” Chamoun said. “We’ve come so far. We’ve made so much progress. There’s so much potential.”
“I hope we continue to reach students — incoming freshmen that have a passion for this,” Chamoun said.
She said people can do their part to help the environment in small ways.
“Put your banana peel in the compost bins or have a reusable water bottle. All those little things, they really do add up,” Chamoun said.
