#zeroby2020

The country of Rwanda is approaching its goal of closing all orphanages throughout the country as children are being placed in families out of the orphanage or reunited with their families. Despite this progress, in some orphanages children remain waiting to receive a family – either because finding a willing family is a challenge or often times, there are orphans ages 18 and older who grew up in the orphanage, never learned life skills to survive on their own, and therefore feel unable to leave the orphanage setting. What does all this mean for the work of “Getting to Zero”? Even when orphanages have closed, the task of caring for vulnerable and orphaned children is far from done.

The work of the Orphan Care Initiative goes far beyond simply “closing orphanages.” The tools and training we provide through the work of the local churches in Rwanda is developing a child welfare system for a country that will ensure that no children grow up outside of family care. If you take the case of the United States, we have no orphanages – in their place we have a system for identifying vulnerable and parentless children, sourcing families to foster and adopt them, and training and monitoring those families so that they are successful. If you look at Rwanda through that view, the work has only begun. There is now a stellar example in Western Rwanda – where the Orphan Care Initiative has focused our efforts at the request of the government – of what it looks like to reintegrate children into families well with the wrap around support of the church.

The main goals of UCI’s Water Action Plan are to reduce potable or drinkable water and reduce our water use as well. By 2020, UCI should have reduced potable water use by 20% or even 30%, reduce irrigation use by 30%, and to continue the treatment of stormwater runoff. This seems ambitious only because of the number of buildings campus but I think that the campus is currently making great strides to complete this goal, especially with all of the programs that are being put in place to help reduce the water use. One example of the program is notifying facilities management if there is a rogue sprinkler or leaky faucet by texting a number. Another is by updating and retrofitting existing plumbing to decrease things like gallon flow, which I thought was interesting since it seemed the most cost and time intensive.

For the Sustainable Practices Policy, I believe the main goal is to have sustainable services for almost everything on campus including, building practices, clean energy, transportation (hydrogen fuel cell bus), waste reduction/recycling, sustainable food services, and environmentally preferable purchasing. This means that services that are wasting resources should be reducing in any way they can, such as for food services, they have a goal to having 20% sustainable food purchases and meeting certain requirements. This policy did not seem to have ambitious goals overall since there were many topics covered, but reading the policy showed that there are numbers to meet. They also have the overall goal of being zero waste by 2020.

The most interesting thing I learned from reading these documents would have to be from the Sustainable Practices Policy, under the Environmentally Preferable Purchasing. One of the sub-headings mentioned “cradle to cradle,” which is defined as a supply chain management plan that the university uses in order to be responsible for doing things like reusing materials. This reminded me of the speaker we had come into class, Anne Krieghoff, and how a student program under her guidance helped reuse the Styrofoam from all of the labs to create surfboards.