Seton Hall’s Blue Goes Green announced a competition to combat food waste on campus. The competition will attempt to discover the best means of notifying students about extra food on campus, rather than discarding it.
Blue Goes Green, in conjunction with the diplomacy Green Team, is asking students to submit ideas for a platform to use for notifying students to the existence of free food. The deadline for submissions is March 13.
[caption id="attachment_21700" align="aligncenter" width="838"]
A GroupMe account created to save wasteful food was deleted after inappropriate comments appeared.
Merinda Gruszecki/Staff Photgrapher.[/caption]
In fall of 2017, the Blue Goes Green task force created a Free Food GroupMe to inform students about free, excess food. However, the GroupMe was canceled after inappropriate messages appeared.
“That’s why we created this competition,” junior English major and Student Government Association (SGA) vice-president Violet Reed said.
Andrea Bartoli, dean of the school of Diplomacy and International Relations said, “We decided that to do a competition was a good invitation for the entire campus to participate in the process.”
From the submissions, only three will receive a trial run.
“The goal is to find a new method of communication that is more efficient,” Jacob Abel, a sophomore diplomacy and international relations major and SGA officer, wrote in an email.
According to Reed, from the three tested platforms, one will be victorious.
Reed said that the platform must be “professional, but functional.”
The two groups are searching for a platform that satisfies three criteria: must be capable of regulating a large group of students, must have two-way communication, and must “reflect the dynamics of the Seton Hall community,” Reed said.
Bartoli said, “The winner [of the competition] will be the one that, in the end, is performing better.”
The original GroupMe failed because the large amount of people “made it very chaotic,” Abel said.
He added, “[W]e had a set of rules which we wanted people to follow, [and] some chose not to.”
Allowing students to participate in the competition, Blue Goes Green and the Green Team hope to create a platform that is more suitable and practical.
“I think it is very, very good for us to spend the time to learn from what happened before [with the Free Food GroupMe],” Bartoli said.
According to Reed, this competition is part of the ongoing effort to create a more environmentally friendly Seton Hall. Blue Goes Green and the Green Team anticipate that the free food initiative will be a successful example of one way that Seton Hall can become an “Earth-conscious campus,” Reed said.
Marie Leone can be reached at marie.leone@student.shu.edu.
Comments
