College, student take prestigious leadership honors given by national association.

In a year the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education says was the most competitive yet for selecting the winners of its annual Campus Sustainability Leadership Awards, two of the six awards went to Ithaca College.

The AASHE, an association of colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada founded in 2006 to promote sustainability in all divisions of higher education, awarded Ithaca College with an institutional award and Sarah Brylinsky ’08 with the Student Sustainability Leadership Award. “We had the most applications ever this year, so winning one of these awards is a significant accomplishment,” says Judy Walton, the acting executive director of AASHE.

AASHE presents four Campus Sustainability Leadership Awards to institutions that have made the greatest overall commitment to sustainability. Ithaca College was honored for its support of sustainability in the classroom as well as for its outreach in the surrounding community.

Brylinsky, who was a resident assistant of the Sustainably Conscious Living Community, won her award for promoting campus sustainability. She prompted the College to require sustainability training for RAs, designed programs for first-year students to connect them with local environmental organizations, worked to make residence halls more eco-friendly, and created Ithaca’s first communications course on sustainability.

The awards were formally presented at the AASHE 2008 conference, “Working Together for Sustainability — On Campus and Beyond,” in November in Raleigh, North Carolina.