Sara Smiley Smith is an enthusiastic and tireless advocate for sustainability at Yale.
Over two decades with the university, Smiley Smith has confronted sustainability challenges with equal parts creativity and determination, whether finding ways to reduce waste at big campus events or pulling invasive dogbane from Yale School of the Environment (YSE)’s Forest Garden, which she helped students, staff, and faculty create in 2016 as a space for research, collaboration, experimentation, and wellness.
As YSE’s Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Research and Sustainability, Smiley Smith oversees an expansive portfolio and provides strategic leadership to both the academic and operational sides of the school. The number of initiatives she has helped to spearhead at YSE is extensive: organizing energy audits and waste audits, chairing the Environmental Stewardship Committee, introducing composting at Kroon Hall, among myriad other projects.
Colleagues describe Smiley Smith as a connector, someone who facilities partnerships across the university and with outside organizations to give Yale students opportunities to solve real-world problems. Those connections frequently lead to innovative sustainability solutions, like the time she helped secure 9,000 hungry beetles to control an outbreak of aphids that were taking over a campus courtyard.
Smiley Smith took a lead role in an energy audit of YSE’s Kroon Hall, empowering students to collect data and work with Yale engineers and architects to improve the building’s efficiency. She is equally passionate about waste diversion, leading audits that determined, among other things, that most of the organic waste produced from YSE events was not food scraps but rather cornstarch-based dishware and cutlery.
“We found out the compostable silverware and plates couldn’t actually go through the biodigester and were getting siphoned off and sent to municipal solid waste,” Smiley Smith recalls. That led to a different strategy—have everyone bring their own plates or bowls to YSE events—which, in turn, led to new unforeseen obstacles.
“If you have a visitor from out of town at an event, they may feel uncomfortable or unwelcome because they didn’t bring a container with them,” explains Smiley Smith.
Rather than shrinking from such challenges, Smiley Smith embraces them, thinking deeply about how to encourage more people to consider sustainability in their decision making. It’s a passion for the environment born from a childhood in small-town Maine, where her family’s history with dairy farming imparted a sense of stewardship for the land. Those values deepened as an undergraduate at Middlebury College, where Smiley Smith confronted heartbreaking instances of environmental injustice, and at Yale, where she earned a PhD in Decision Making, Change, and Sustainability, and was a pioneering staffer in the newly created Office of Sustainability in 2005.
“When I find a problem, I tend to not let it go,” says Smiley Smith. “I am attracted to the creativity and problem solving in this kind of work. I love being able to get my hands dirty and affect change within the complex systems all around us.”
Do you know a sustainability champion at Yale? Email sustainability@yale.edu and tell us about a student, staff, or faculty member who is leading the charge toward a more sustainable campus.