Leading on Climate
Dante Gonzales
Bonnie Reiss CNI Fellow Class of 2019
Bonnie Reiss CNI Student Engagement Fellow
Undergraduate Student, Environmental Science and Political Science
UC Berkeley
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
As the new Berkeley CNI Engagement fellow, Dante will be focusing on community engagement/resiliency of both our campus and surrounding neighborhoods, and creating institutional change in our dining halls in terms of implementing more plant-forward recipes and designing staff trainings to shift these workplaces into a more sustainable/carbon neutral future. In order to achieve these goals, Dante is forming Carbon Crew (Read more about Carbon Crew here: https://serc.berkeley.edu/carbon-neutrality-2025/). To increase community engagement and resiliency, he will be working towards establishing a support group of Berkeley students to advise and educate local K-12 students in how to effectively implement change regarding carbon neutrality in their schools and district. Lastly, Dante will be continuing the work of his predecessor by working towards implementing new plant-forward recipes at campus dining halls in order to reduce carbon offsets produced through meat consumption along with promoting the use of local produce in season in order to also reduce carbon offsets from transportation. These efforts will also be partnered with educational sampling campaigns to shift the discourse surrounding vegetarian/vegan dishes. The aforementioned plans will be carried out alongside tabling, branding the carbon neutrality initiative, and forums intended to engage Berkeley students with both the goals of the carbon neutrality initiative, and promote personal as well as community wide goals to reduce carbon emissions.
