Thomas R. Macagno, Ph.D.

Sustainable business in practice

A student team in protective coats, hairnets and gloves inside a dairy processing plant — Student team inside the Marburger processing plant.

Marburger Farm Dairy aggregates milk from more than seventy family farms in western Pennsylvania, processes it, and sells into Walmart. When Walmart began requiring sustainability data from its suppliers, Marburger had nobody to produce it.

I was connected to them, and suggested their challenge could become the semester-long final assignment for my Corporate Social Responsibility class.

That relationship ran for five years, and grew to include climate adaptation planning for their business.

Marburger was a great partner and grateful for the help. The students got something harder to come by: insight into what managing corporate responsibility actually looks like inside a real organisation, with real constraints and someone needing an answer.

A community with real challenges

Chatham students running a street stall at a town festival, with a
watershed survey board and a tank of creek water — Students at Mars Applefest, asking residents about the Breakneck Creek watershed.

Mars is a small borough in rural Butler County, Pennsylvania. It wanted to take sustainability seriously and needed to know what that meant in practice for the people who live there. Almost everything published on the subject assumes a large city. A rural town is a different problem.

It also mattered that much of the town held a different view of sustainability from the one the students arrived with. So the first lesson, for all of us, was to meet people where they were and find out what they actually needed.

Students went to where residents actually live. The library. The microbrewery. The retirement communities. A stall at Applefest with a tank of creek water and a survey about the watershed.

The work supported the mayor’s office in developing a plan of action for sustainability, particularly on stormwater flooding. The students came away knowing how to engage a community that does not already agree with them, which is a harder skill than any of the analysis.

The relationship continued after I left Chatham.

Working with startups and entrepreneurs

Students and a founder crouched around exposed pipework in a plant
room, fitting a sensor to a water main — Fitting an acoustic sensor to a campus water main with the founder.

A startup had built a device that listens to water pipes. It picks up the sound of a leak, or of a break that has not surfaced yet. What the founder did not have was a real system to run it on. Students installed it in university facilities and ran the test.

That was one of several pairings in Green and Social Innovation, a course I created at Chatham in graduate and undergraduate versions. Cohorts worked with real startups developing sustainability products and services. The founders got student support and, just as usefully, somewhere to test — our campuses and facilities.

The students got the experience and, more importantly, the feel of what working in a startup is actually like — the pace, the improvisation, the absence of anyone with the answer. The entrepreneurs got support they needed and could not otherwise afford.

From an empty field → a beloved place

The site before activation, overgrown around the existing trailer — Before

A community garden with reclaimed barrels and an outdoor gathering space — After

This is what Greenacre looked like when I took it over. Land set aside, a trailer put on it, and nothing wrong with the place at all. It simply wasn’t being used.

I didn’t found Greenacre. I led the team that activated it.

It was a chance to put my leadership philosophy into practice. Orientation: we were clear that Greenacre had to be a place that supported student wellbeing while teaching them other things as well. Trust: my team, the students and everyone else co-developed the space, and I did not micromanage it or kill their creativity. Agency: they were encouraged to get on with things and ask forgiveness rather than permission.

We worked well together and created a place people find magical.

Aligning with the stars and strategy

Greenacre organising principle showing Head, Hands and Heart
around Iomlán, with the university strategic objectives —
driving sustainability, student experience, fostering inclusion and
Irish roots — on the outer spokes — Iomlán is Greenacre’s organising principle.

By iterating and trying different things, we arrived at Greenacre’s organising principle. It connects Head, Hands and Heart around Iomlán, which means wholeness in Irish.

The idea is that Greenacre creates a whole experience, and one that answers to the university’s own strategic objectives — sustainability, inclusion, Irish roots and student experience.

The three practices are what we use to organise programmes and activities. Head builds confidence through experience, reflection and the application of practical skills. Hands means food, soil and living systems, and turns imagination and reclaimed materials into something tangible — growing and making are a single practice here. Heart brings people across roles and backgrounds into community and belonging, and is where the growth of the individual happens.

Volunteering opportunities on campus

Student attaching reclaimed whiskey barrel staves to a structure at Greenacre — A student cladding the community hut in reclaimed whiskey-barrel staves.

Greenacre offers students a range of ways to volunteer. They garden, maintain the trails, help at the festivals and events, and build.

Pictured is a student working on the Hobbit Hut — styled after Lord of the Rings, it is a community space. Teeling Whiskey donated spent oak barrels, and we released the staves and clad the structure in them. The work demonstrates circularity, and everyone is able to build.

Many students find us through studentvolunteer.ie, the national volunteering scheme Irish universities use to connect students to opportunities on their own campus.

Many arrive at university having never gardened or built anything. Greenacre gives them a chance to learn, and to meet like-minded people.

Reimagining teaching spaces

A class seated along a long wooden table in a covered outdoor
classroom at Greenacre, working with Sustainable Development Goal
cards, with the lecturer standing at the far end — A class on the MSc in Sustainability, taught outdoors at Greenacre.

Workshops and student wellbeing

Students seated along a long outdoor table under bunting, sorting
foraged pine cones, seed heads and dried plants into trays — Imagining the Sustainable Development Goals in natural materials.

Four members of the Greenacre team holding framed UCD Values in Action
award certificates, with the President of UCD — The Greenacre team receiving a UCD Values in Action award.

Greenacre activity and community engagement — Greenacre — created through the contributions of students, colleagues, artists and partners.

Recognised for our work

The Greenacre team received a Values in Action award from the President of UCD, Professor Orla Feely, for the work on the site.

The award is nominated by peers from across the university, and that showed that we had hit the mark. We had created Greenacre in a way that showed everyone wonder.