On a sunny day last September, students in Yale’s “Sustainable Implementation” course traded Sage Hall for a humming material recovery facility in Berlin, Connecticut, for an up-close lesson on what change management looks like off the page.
As mixed recycling from Yale and dozens of other customers sped along conveyer belts, plant managers explained how the high-tech system sorts waste into refrigerator-size bales of paper, plastic, and metal for resale and remanufacturing. The tour made the course’s central premise tangible: in complex institutions, progress depends not just on good ideas, but on the people, infrastructure, incentives, and coordination required to carry them out.
Back on campus, that same emphasis on systems thinking shaped the rest of the semester. The course, “Sustainability Implementation: Change Management in Institutional Settings” (ENV 966/EVST 308), is designed less as a survey of sustainability challenges than as a practicum in how large institutions decide, act, and—just as often—stall.
Co-taught by Lindsay Crum of the Yale Office of Sustainability and Sara Smiley Smith of Yale Planetary Solutions, the class pairs change-management theory with a tour through Yale’s operational realities. Weekly sessions bring in the Yale staff leaders responsible for energy and greenhouse gas accounting, waste, transportation, buildings, procurement and food, measurement and reporting, and partnerships beyond campus—so students can see how ambitions translate into budgets, workflows, data systems, and decision making.
The capstone course gives students a chance to roll up their sleeves and contribute to shaping the future of climate and sustainability work at Yale.
As the course description puts it, students experience the “friction, joy, disappointment, learning, and challenge” that come with trying to make real change in complex systems.
Sustainability as a system, not a checklist
Yale’s long sustainability history makes the campus a useful place to study how institutions actually change. Long before sustainability offices and strategic plans, the university was sending food scraps to local pig farmers in the 1800s. Later came energy-crisis-era infrastructure shifts, early recycling programs in the late 1980s, and, eventually ,the creation of the Office of Sustainability in 2005.
From that origin story, the course moves through the operational domains where sustainability goals either become reality or get stuck. Week by week, students meet the people responsible for tracking energy and greenhouse gas emissions, waste systems (and the challenge of piloting new approaches in an academic setting), transportation planning, building design and life-cycle decision making, and procurement and food.
Across those conversations, the goal is less to memorize a list of initiatives than to understand how the pieces fit together — how decisions about buildings affect emissions, how procurement shapes waste streams, and how data and accountability influence what happens next.
“Sustainability work is rarely linear or simple. It requires collaboration, strategy, and the ability to navigate complexity,” Crum says. “In this course, students work on real Yale projects that allow them to ‘write a chapter in the novel,’ even if they are not writing the whole story. The goal is to help them understand that meaningful systems change takes time, nuance, and persistence, but that their contributions can still meaningfully shape the outcome.”
Turning ideas into durable progress
Zooming out, the course also asks students to look beyond campus and at how city, state, and regional policies help shape priorities and strategies across institutions. Throughout the fall, students work in teams to design solutions to current sustainability challenges at Yale, with operational leaders serving as project partners and “clients.”
Teams develop a work plan, conduct background research, collect and analyze data, and interview or survey key stakeholders to understand both the opportunities for change and the roadblocks that can slow it down.
Students present their progress at the mid-point of the semester and again at the end, when teams deliver a final paper or product designed to be used by campus partners—not just filed away after grading.
In fall 2025, projects spanned sustainability planning, building materials, and landscape management. One team examined how Yale has set sustainability goals in the past, and explored other models for this planning work, producing a sustainability planning “playbook” and proposed framework for the next strategic plan. Another explored policy and incentive models to shift building projects from demolition toward deconstruction, including tools such as pre-demolition audits and contractor incentives. A third focused on why sustainable landscapes can falter after installation and proposed practical maintenance and training tools, including a zonated maintenance plan and a pocket guide.
Across all three, a common lesson emerged: progress depends on who has decision-making authority, what incentives and standards are in place, the quality of available data, and whether the institution builds the capacity to follow through.
“It has been exciting to bring students into this change management work here on Yale’s campus through this course,” Smiley Smith says. “I hope that as they move into their careers, they will bring these experiences with them and be able to deploy their change-management tools to help them be impactful change agents across the broad array of planetary challenges we face.”
“Sustainability Implementation: Change Management in Institutional Settings” (ENV 966/EVST 308) will return for a third year in fall 2026.