On Monday MTV announced the five winners of its Break the Addiction Challenge. SMU was chosen as one of the five challenge winners.
The challenge was a nationwide eco-competition that called on students to promote and demonstrate environmental changes in their school community.
The challenge was originally created for high-school and college students to urge them to make a difference in their community.
According to a press release from MTV communications, for this challenge, MTV, in conjunction with the Campus Climate Challenge, required the student applicants to earn media recognition for their school group’s green activities.
MTV and the Campus Climate Challenge then chose five schools and awarded each of the groups a $1,000 grant.
Here at SMU, the winning students successfully lobbied to join the EPA Green Power Partnership, which requires at least 3% of the electricity on campus to come from new, renewable energy sources.
Freshman Mallory McCall, outgoing four-year chairperson for the Keep America Beautiful campaign, commended SMU for its work.
“I am so excited that people are thinking out of the box and becoming more aware of their environment. We as the SMU community should try our best to remain conscious of the environmental issues that affect our school and lives,” she said.
The other four winning schools included the University of Massachusetts (Amherst, Mass.), St. John’s University (Annapolis, Md.), The University of Colorado (Boulder, Col.) and James Madison University (Harrisonburg,Va.).
The environmentally conscious projects and activities that also won included projects like a Hybrid Car show on campus, the creation of an extra-curricular club called “Students for a Sustainable Future,” that urges the student body to promote a 100% clean energy policy, the creation of the Clean Energy Coalition, an association of student organizations dedicated to convincing students to purchase environmentally friendly electricity
MTV President, Christina Norman noted that the MTV audience was having a huge attitude shift toward the serious environmental issues facing the MTV generation.
“2006 represented an integral year in the fight against global warming. For the first time ever, young people cited the environment as the most important issue their generation would have to face,” she said.
According to a press release, MTV’s partnership in the Break the Addiction Challenge has played a crucial role in the student climate movement, mobilizing high-school and college students all over the country who are demanding change. In only four months, nearly 130 new student groups have popped up across the country to join the largest network of students demanding a clean energy revolution.
Southern Methodist University students successfully lobbied to join the EPA Green Power Partnership, a membership requiring that at least 3 percent of the electricity on campus come from new, renewable energy sources.
