To contact the committee, please email community-action-fund@willamette.edu.
The CAFES committee is composed of student committee members selected by the previous committee and appointed by ASWU, SBA, and ASA. Non-voting staff committee members represent Academic Affairs, Student Affairs, and University Services.
To contact the committee, please email community-action-fund@willamette.edu.
Committee Chair
In April 2014 ASWU Senate voted on a proposed The Green Fund constitution and held a campus wide referendum where a majority of voting undergraduate students supported the establishment of The Green Fund program.
Five years later in March of 2019, the 2018-19 committee voted to change the name of the program from "The Green Fund" to the "Community Action Fund for Equity & Sustainability" (CAFES) in order to better represent the overall mission of which has expanded beyond sustainability measures and has now encompassed and become centered around social justice and equity related efforts.
Willamette University's Community Action Fund for Equity & Sustainability program is supported by a $25 per student per semester fee. Currently only non-ASP undergraduate students and students from the AGSM and Law Schools are charged the fee.
The fee is entirely optional, see below.
Students are automatically charged the fee but are provided with an opt-out option each semester if they do not want to support the program. If a student opts out of the fee in the fall they will be automatically opted out in the spring as well. Deadlines for opting out are set approximately two weeks after the beginning of classes each semester and all students are notified via email about a week before the deadline.
The program is administered by a committee of voting students and non-voting advisory staff. The Willamette University Sustainability Institute is the administrative home for the program. Details about committee actions and processes can be found in the CAFES bylaws.
The Community Action Fund for Equity & Sustainability Committee builds on the experience of over 150 universities that have established similar funds over the past ten years. Many are student-fee based and most put students in decision-making roles to fund projects that can be proposed by students, staff, and faculty. Every year, members of CAFES attend the Washington Oregon Cascadia Higher Education Sustainability to collaborate with members of committees like ours. In doing so, we aim to broaden our outlook on what CAFES can do for our university and implement new ideas that help us to better support projects on campus.
Laura Taylor, Associate Provost for Academic Finance & Associate Professor of Economics
Lisa Holliday, Associate Dean of Students and Director of Student Engagement & Leadership
Mark Mazurier, Assistant Director, Campus Planning
