emPOWER Brown

Hey all,

The emPOWER-EcoReps Earth Day Carnival was featured in a segment on Channel 12 News! Check it out here… see who you can spot! http://www.wpri.com/dpp/on_air/green_team/local-students-host-earth-day-carnival-at-brown-university-

… will be a PIZZA PARTY! Come celebrate the end of the year with us, eat pizza, and wrap up the semester. We’ll be talking about what went well this semester, what we’d like to do again, and what we’d like to change or do differently. Your input is very important!

Note the time change: We will all meet together from 8:30-9:30 p.m. Please contact your member group rep to find out if you’ll also be meeting at your regularly scheduled time.

All of us at Environmental Events, EcoReps, and the rest of emPOWER’s member groups are feeling tired but elated after the end of Earth Week. We had around 300 attendees for our keynote speech by Bill McKibben yesterday! Check back in the next couple of weeks for pictures from our Earth Week events and a video of Bill’s talk. Thank you for attending our events, and we hope to see you at Earth Week 2012!

Due to an unfortunate technicality surrounding the acquisition of used bicycles for the “People-Powered Playoffs,” the competition has been canceled. We hope to host the event in the future, so look for it in coming semesters and/or as part of Earth Week 2012!

The “Students in Action” training may have been canceled, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get in a day of activism and advocacy this week. On Wednesday, join the Environment Council of RI (ECRI) for “Earth Day at the State House” at 2 p.m. for a presentation and lobbying.

Then, on Friday, come to Salomon 203 at 6 p.m. for the Power Shift ’11 Potluck and Powwow.

For more information, check out the updated Earth Week 2011 page.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, the Students in Action Conference, which was scheduled for this Wednesday, has been canceled. Please stay tuned, as it may be rescheduled soon.

emPOWER S-Comm Elections will be held NEXT SUNDAY, April 9 at 8:50 PM.  Please consider yourself eligible to vote only if you have attended 3 or more emPOWER meetings this semester.  Candidates’ Statements are below.  Enjoy!

Executive Director

Paige Kirsten

My name is Paige Kirstein and I’m a junior concentrating in economics. I have been involved with emPOWER since spring of my freshman year when I joined Beyond the Bottle. Immediately, I got involved in my member group – planning events, tabling, etc. In the spring of my sophomore year, I decided to become more involved in the emPOWER community at large and joined steering committee as Communications Director and became lead coordinator for Beyond the Bottle. During my two years in emPOWER I have seen the structure, member groups, and general membership change. To me, emPOWER is a special organization because we are always looking to better ourselves. We are always looking to start new projects, better our election process, and generally grow as an organization. I hope to lead this incredible group next year and continue to seek out ways can improve for our members, the Brown community at large, and the earth.

Communications Director

Lilly Mirviss

My name is Lilly,
I’m really quite silly,
And I’m from San Francisco
Where it’s very very hilly.
My name is Lilly, and I’m running for Communications Director for 2011-2012.  I joined emPOWER last January when I co-founded SCRAP, Brown’s student-run composting group, and, after chairing SCRAP for about 6 months, I became emPOWER’s current Communications Director.  From the moment that I joined emPOWER, I have felt loved and supported by Brown’s environmental community, and I hope that as Communications Director, I have helped new members feel welcomed into this awesome community in turn.  I look forward to Sunday mornings when I draft the emPOWER digest, and I hope that it brings smiles to your faces and fills your hearts with environmental joy as you read it.  For those of you who have missed my emPOWER Sunday Digests or Morning Mail Announcements, my specialty as Communications Director is poems, and I write these fun environmental poems to keep you all excited about emPOWER.  Next year, I plan to continue my weekly poem trend and I will start giving the digest a weekly theme (I will of course be open to suggestions).  In addition, as Communications Director I also help bring speakers to Brown University, such as Michael and Ted from the Breakthrough Institute, and next year I will work on bringing even more environmental speakers to Brown’s campus.  emPOWER has made my time at Brown an incredible experience, and I hope that as Communications Director, I can help you all gain this experience as well.

Junior Social Chair

Mali’o Kodis

Hey everyone! I’ve realized throughout the course of this year that there’s no better feeling that walking into a club or a group of people and having it feel like a gathering of friends instead of a room of strangers. emPOWER meetings are already a great escape from the Sunday night crunch, and as more time goes on I feel like the meetings become more a gathering of friends and less a room of strangers. I know that as we get to know each other better, the work that we do both on and off campus will only improve and become even
more fun! It’s my hope that as Social Chair, I would be able to coordinate activities like potlucks and field trips to go kayaking or hiking near campus. I think that the responsibilities of social chair are integral to a rockin emPOWER and hopefully on Sunday nights, we all walk into a room of familiar names, faces, and personalities ready to get invested in doing what we love with a group of awesome people.
See you Sunday!

Jenny Li

Hey y’all! For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Jenny and I’m a freshman in Ecoreps and Beyond the Bottle. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how environmental issues can be depressing and sometimes, we hippie-dippie-liberal-environmentalists want to forget about the world imploding and just get down! I’m all for talking about issues but the real injustice here is that we meet every Sunday and yet we still don’t know each other by name! I promise if you vote for me to be junior social chair, I will change all of that. I will organize the best (environmentally friendly) ragers, tea parties, potlucks, kayak trips, bike trips, beach days, yoga sessions, karaoke nights, and maybe even an emPOWERlympics! Basically, I want an excuse to channel all my energy into organizing parties for the people I love most – YOU GUYS. Do the right thing and vote for me, Jenny Li, to be junior social chair!