Vanessa Arcara, a recent master’s graduate from Bard College’s Center on Environmental Protection, gave a well-received session on Tuesday titled “Moving Millennials: Engaging youth with food & agriculture policy.”

Arcara made it clear that her talk is intended for a gamut of sustainability change-makers on campuses, from students, to operational administrators, to faculty, and more: “We’re here to reach students and not just be another sound bite, and this information can be transferable to other environmental sectors as well.”

The presentation seamlessly segued from Plenary Speaker Leith Sharp’s talk on strategically communicating and effecting change on campuses, but looking specifically at one, influential audience: millennials. The essence of her presentation was concerned with analyzing how we communicate to college students or young Americans about food policy from a values perspective, and what types of projects encourage students to engage in civic action.

Holding a series of focus groups and interviews of various undergraduate students, Arcara found that millennials tend to hold core values that are in line with what sustainability professionals desire from change agents and change-makers. These values include community, equity, global consciousness, and personal growth. Thus, successful sustainability campaigns should be built around core values.

After discussing the findings from her research around values to which students associate, Arcara posed several recommendations to serve as tangible take-aways for the audience. One of these recommendations included the creation of a visual aid to depict engagement pathways, or opportunities that students can get involved in in varying degrees. However, the visual representation of these pathways help to increase the chance that students will want to commit for a few reasons.

For one, the options are laid out clearly and if put into a diagram or visual aid of sorts, could be distributed as an electronic or print hand-out that will also make the project more memorable and the chances of engaging more students higher. Another reason is that a visual aid helps take out the “scare” factor of signing up for another club, another project, another research project, which is often what sustainability professionals are up against when trying to engage students.

Arcara pointed out that there’s a remarkable opportunity to do a better job, mainly because the student demography has not yet reached a huge involvement.

To contact Vanessa Arcara and hear more about her research or above-mentioned recommendations to effect more meaningful change in sustainable food policy, you can email her at vanessa.arcara@gmail.com.