TOWARDS AN ECOPEDAGOGY Environmental organizations, university politics and student experiences at the nexus of education and environmental action

Abstract

Non-profit environmental organizations on post-secondary campuses provide both practical services and unique educational opportunities for students while also contributing to broader community well-being. These organizations function as progressive social movement actors, advancing sustainability and justice goals through a wide array of activities: DIY skill-sharing (e.g., bike repair, gardening), waste reduction (e.g., free stores, refurbishing old bikes), community economics (e.g., free food distribution, item lending), and social enterprise (e.g., fair trade cafés, cooperative grocery initiatives). Sitting at the nexus of these social movements and education, these organizations cultivate engaged citizen-activists, equipping students with skills, values, and experiences that shaping their future careers, political engagement and community involvement. In doing so, they challenge dominant capitalist narratives and demonstrate what sustainable alter- or post-capitalist futures might look like. Their existence, however, presents a challenge to the neo-liberal educational institution, whose curriculum and programs also cultivate students who are in turn responsible for much of the world’s environmental degradation and economic inequity. This dissertation examines student-involved environmental organizations within that context. It integrates my fifteen years of experience as a campus-based environmental activist with a historiography of campus environmental initiatives in Canada, a national baseline survey of staff, executives, and volunteers, and in-depth interviews with twenty-two participants. Through this combination of lived experience, empirical data, and theoretical engagement with social movement and educational scholarship, the study offers a comprehensive analysis of how these organizations operate and the impacts they generate. The goals of this study were: (1) to understand student-involved environmental non-profit organizations' current situation (on a macro and micro level), including the socio-political contexts they reside in, and provide recommendations to ensure these organizations have the resources, knowledge, support and structures to: (a) be as effective as possible at creating and sustaining environmental change; (b) succeed in delivering high-quality and transformative educational experiences for these student-activists; (2) to understand and improve the educational aspects of member-volunteer participation with these organizations and how the current socio-political situation of these organizations impacts the educational outcomes for member-volunteers. The research concludes that student-involved environmental organizations are central drivers of sustainability and social justice in the university setting, and in the development of students into engaged citizens. These organizations improve affordability, strengthen community, and provide transformative educational experiences that formal curricula rarely match. At the same time, they face persistent structural challenges, including precarious funding, space insecurity, and political pressures from both university administrations and broader political shifts toward austerity. The evidence suggests that their resilience depends on supportive institutional frameworks, reliable funding mechanisms, and stronger recognition of their role as educational actors rather than peripheral clubs. More broadly, this work reinforces the need to reimagine universities not only as sites of credentialing but as incubators of democratic practice, collective agency, and sustainability innovation. Student-involved environmental organizations offer more than services; they model viable alternatives to the unsustainability of late-modern capitalism and train the future leaders and engaged citizens who will carry those alternatives forward.