About Us

In 2017, students and staff at Iowa State University (ISU) began exploring how to celebrate their sustainability program’s upcoming 10 year anniversary. As plans started coming together for monthly themes and events, they soon decided to further honor their decennial anniversary by hosting a sustainability conference for student leaders. Their goal was to connect students throughout Iowa who had interests in sustainability and help those students build lasting relationships with each other. In the fall of 2017, ISU began gauging interest from other Iowa colleges and universities to attend the conference.

The University of Northern Iowa (UNI) quickly expressed interest and excitement in the conference. As ISU and UNI continued to collaborate, there was growing interest in expanding this beyond a one-time celebration. Pending a successful inaugural conference and support from conference attendees, UNI volunteered to turn it into an annual event by hosting the second conference.

The first conference was held at ISU in the spring of 2019 and was indeed a success. Eighty-one students, staff, and faculty attended from 11 schools. Attendees were excited for an opportunity to connect with peers from other schools and didn’t want those connections to end after the conference. They were supportive of building on the conference to create a sustainability network across Iowa. To help facilitate sharing and collaboration, a shared Google Drive and Facebook group were created. The second conference was hosted at UNI in March, 2020.

After the second conference, the momentum continued and the University of Iowa (UI) was next on the list to host a student conference. However, due to health and safety concerns related to COVID-19, representatives from UI, ISU, and UNI decided to postpone the in-person 2021 conference.

While the in-person conference for 2021 was postponed, it created an opportunity to explore alternative virtual programming in collaboration with all Iowa colleges and universities.  Expanding into virtual events also set the stage for continued virtual events even after the in-person conference resumes.  While in-person events offer a unique atmosphere for networking and collaboration, the benefits of virtual programming are worth noting, such as reducing the environmental impact of events through reduced travel, reducing cost barriers for attendance, reducing time commitments and class conflicts, and broadening our audience.

The 2022 conference is a great success hosted by the University of Iowa, and featured many sustainable celebrities from the University Alumni.

The 2024 conference is in development and planning stages. It will be hosted by the Iowa State University Student Government Sustainability Team. Registration opens February 14, 2024.

We are excited to see how the One Sustainable Iowa Network has grown over the last four years and hope that you find this to be a valuable resource for connecting and collaborating with other sustainability leaders across Iowa.