The question of how to finance sustainability projects on campus can often be one of the biggest obstacles to getting a campus sustainability movement off the ground.  Often, “going green” is perceived as more expensive than not and the increasingly tight budgets on many college campuses means a lack of capital funding available to initiate projects related to sustainability.  Several colleges, however, have found creative ways to initiate and fund sustainability projects on their campuses and in turn have found that going green can often not only be fiscally feasible, but can also be a way of generating funding for additional projects. 

Perhaps the most successful example of a school that managed to finance sustainability on its campus is Harvard with its Green Campus Loan Fund (GCLF).  In January 2002, the Harvard Green Campus Initiative (HGCI) initiated the GCLF with a $3 million allocation from the Harvard bank.  The HGCI was charged with administering the fund for projects that relate to sustainability.  Though Harvard has tremendous financial resources that most other colleges do not, the basic model associated with the GCLF is replicable.  The GCLF provides interest-free capital for investments related to sustainability that have a pay-back period of five years.  Within only a few years of implementing the program, the investments that received funding had generated enough return on investment (ROI) (cost savings realized from the projects goes back into the GCLF) to grab the attention of then President Lawrence Summers.  In December 2004, he doubled the fund’s size to $6 million and again doubled its size in April 2006 so that it stands now at an impressive $12 million. 

In Spring 2006, two students at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, established that school’s Clean Energy Revolving Fund (CERF).  The original funding for CERF ($27,000) came from the Macalester College Student Government and the college’s Environmental Studies department.  Over the next several years, the students continued to solicit funding for the program and by the end of 2008 had received some $100,000 in commitments.  CERF targets projects that generate financial returns needed to service the loans distributed but from time to time, the program will provide a loan for a program that does not generate cash flow if the requestor can make a case that the project will considerably advance sustainability on campus without jeopardizing the viability of the program as a whole. 

While some still believe that “going green” is not an economically feasible decision for colleges and universities, the success of some programs seem to suggest that sustainability initiatives on campus can have tremendous financial returns for a college or university.  For example, according to National Association of College and University Business Officer’s (NACUBO) publication, Financing Sustainability on Campus, Harvard’s GCLF has funded “more than 160 projects projected to save the university $3.8 million per year with an average project ROI of 26%.”  Colleges and universities are finding it increasingly difficult to ignore the growing trend toward sustainability initiatives as students are beginning to make demands of their schools to “go green.”  Whereas once college administrators cringed at such discussions, the success of Harvard’s GCLF and Macalester College’s CERF should put their minds at ease that there are economically feasible ways to fund sustainability on college campuses.