In Frank Dining Hall, an overnight oats bar tempts students to enjoy a plant-based breakfast.
Throughout campus, Facilities staff are identifying pest control methods that avoid harm to vital pollinators.
At the campus Organic Farm, a newly created pond is a habitat for amphibians and reptiles.
Each of these student-led projects was made possible by grants from the Pomona President’s Sustainability Fund (PSF), established to encourage student environmental initiatives.
This spring semester, nine approved projects received a total of $13,200. Alexis Reyes, the College’s director of sustainability and energy management who oversees the grants, credits Sydney Tai ’26, ASPC’s commissioner for facilities and the environment, with providing a matching ASPC grant to increase project funding.
The projects tackled issues ranging from dining hall food waste to automatic lighting in residence halls and water bottle refill stations.
“Since the PSF was established in 2007, it has awarded over $100,000 for student projects,” says Reyes. “Many of the sustainability programs we have today started as PSF pilot projects, including the dining hall compost program, reusable Greenware dishes for events, drying rack check-outs, the water bottle refill station at Smith Campus Center and Green Bikes’ U-lock check-out program.”
Sustainable Dining Plan & Implementation
Nora Wilcox ’28, Penelope Wu ’29 and Jaden Yang ’28 began their efforts to increase plant-based dining options during the fall semester, even before obtaining the grant. They have been working with Executive Chef Travis Ellis to adopt the Forward Food Pledge.
“It’s a commitment to 50% plant-based food in roughly five years,” says Yang, a physics and politics major. The pledge is an effort of the Humane World for Animals organization and signatories include dozens of colleges and universities, including UCLA, UC Berkeley and the University of Texas at Austin.
“Right now, there’s a trend of protein emphasis on social media that includes a lot of meat and dairy products. People are thinking that the plant-based diet is no longer a healthy option,” says Wu, adding that this is especially true of athletes who worry they won’t get enough protein.
“Reality is, you can get enough protein from a plant-based diet,” Wu says. “It’s important that we educate college students and the community that plant-based is very nutritious, sustainable and delicious.”
The three project leaders recognize that many students want meat options in the dining halls, and menus will continue to include them. They’ve been working with Ellis to make changes gradually to avoid push-back. And they recently held a taste-test event that gave students a chance to try plant-based food the dining halls already serve.
Yang says that a survey they carried out early in the school year showed that well over half of Pomona students, regardless of their preferred diet, want to see more plant-based dining options.
Eating more plant-based food “doesn’t mean you’re becoming vegan and you’re never going to eat meat again,” says Wilcox, who’s majoring in English. “It’s just being more conscious of your impact on the earth.”
Integrated Pest Management Gap Analysis
When Isha Raheja ’27 was in high school, the beehive she kept was completely wiped out when a neighboring school administered pesticides to manage a wild hive.
“Pesticides can drift several miles and affect not only target species but also beneficial insects and pollinators,” says the public policy analysis major, adding “We are currently living in what scientists have dubbed ‘an insect apocalypse.’”
Raheja and project partner Kitty Chadwyck-Healey ’27, a politics major, aim to help Pomona reduce harmful effects of pest control products while safely managing pests to guard human health. They partnered with Facilities and Campus Services, the Sustainability office and the College’s pest control vendor to map out when and where various products were administered. They then developed a toxicity database and designed a pilot program with organic pest control options.
“We wanted to establish the best green alternatives to pilot at the most impactful locations,” says Raheja. “We wanted to ensure Facilities would have data-informed insights for a potential green transition or future integrated pest management plan.”
“Being able to communicate openly with Facilities has been so vital to this project,” says Chadwyck-Healey. “I am so appreciative of the Facilities team for being so willing to answer our questions and work with us. Through this collaboration, I’ve become very aware of the many considerations that need to go into pest control on a campus like ours.”
This month, Raheja brought a beehive to the Pomona College Organic Farm. She hopes that through careful pest management at the College, these bees will not suffer the same fate as those in her high school hive.
Amphibian and Reptile Habitat Enhancement at the Pomona Farm
Anna Parrott ’26 began working at the College’s Farm her first year at Pomona. An environmental analysis major with an emphasis in biology, she also led the Farm Club, which holds social events to get students engaged with the Farm. A Farm Fest, for example, drew more than 100 people to hear bands under the trees and eat food grown on the property.
A herpetology class piqued Parrott’s interest in how the Farm could not just grow food but also be a supportive amphibian and reptile habitat. In response, she built a small pond that she hopes will become a home for local frogs. The water is not chemically treated, and there are no fish or invasive turtle species that would eat the frog eggs.
Parrott aimed to engage students with the pond.
“At the beginning of the semester we had this event that was cheekily labeled ‘Dig a Hole’ at the Farm,” she says. “We had 10 people show up, which was more than enough to dig the hole. It was so fun.”
Parrott decided to line the pond walls with bentonite, a type of absorbent clay composed mainly of volcanic ash that expands and seals. Finding the right technique for applying the bentonite to the dirt surfaces to make the pond waterproof required trial and error. Several times when the pond leaked and became a mud hole, she had to dig out the clay and start all over again.
Parrott thinks it was worth the hard work in order to avoid using plastic to line the pond.
“We don’t really know the impact of microplastics on people or animals, and we do know that frogs are really sensitive to changes in water quality,” she says. “So [using bentonite] felt like something we could do to provide a better habitat for these frogs.”