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The SPIKE Center for Sustainability Education was launched in fall 2025 after aÌý$10 million gift from Buff alumnus Spike Buckley, which was given in response to Chancellor Justin Schwartz’s identification of sustainability as a campus priority. Since its inception, the center has grown into an accelerator for sustainability education and leadership on campus.

The Provost’s Post recently spoke with the Faculty Executive Director for the SPIKE Center for Sustainability Education Max Boykoff, who is also a fellow with the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) and a professor in the Department of Environmental Studies, about what the SPIKE Center has been working on during its first academic year and what the next year will bring.

An academic year in, how has SPIKE Center developed and/or evolved compared to how it was first envisioned?

This transformative gift from Spike Buckley provides an opportunity for us at CU Boulder to come together as a globally recognized sustainability-related education destination for students preparing for careers that help to navigate their lives and livelihoods in the 21st century world. This is our moment to move forward as we build on many key initiatives developed over the past decades by CU Boulder faculty and administrative leadership. We have been evolving our plans as our outstanding and capable SPIKE Center team integrates lessons learned from these past efforts while we move forward.

We have benefited from many conversations with students, staff, faculty and administrative leaders this academic year to align SPIKE Center priorities with demands, needs and aspirations here on campus regarding sustainability pedagogy and education in the next few years. We have therefore developed concrete plans to support the faculty creation of a sustainability minor for students to begin enrolling in fall 2027. The details are yet to be developed—and will require ongoing engagement with connected divisions, schools, colleges, centers and everyone in them—yet the larger goal and timeline have come into focus through our iterative strategic planning process over the past six months.

Our ambitions have risen as we have worked to better understand our great capabilities and appetite for transformative sustainability education on this campus in these times. We recognize that this is uniquely possible here and that many members of our campus community are ready for us all to move forward with planning to reach every student at CU Boulder with meaningful sustainability-related educational opportunities by the year 2030.

How is this work supporting the campus’s broader sustainability work?

The work of the SPIKE Center takes place within the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Sustainability, led by Vice Chancellor for Sustainability Andrew Mayock, where education is one of the four priorities for sustainability implementation on campus. By working to support and accelerate our training of students to become leaders who drive transformational environmental change, we are helping CU Boulder meet its goal of becoming a global leader in sustainability within public higher education.

Q: What can the CU Boulder community expect from SPIKE going forward into year two?

A: Our initial focus has been to engage with groups and already-existing initiatives across campus to support sustainability education endeavors, generate awareness and engage in dialogues to envision the future of sustainability education at CU Boulder.Ìý

In the coming years, we seek to engage and graduate the highest proportion of sustainability-focused students in global public higher education and achieve significant increases in graduation and post-graduation employment rates among sustainability-focused students. We will do this by providing opportunities for the entire campus to engage with sustainability education as we build and strengthen connections and receive and integrate feedback from our students, staff, faculty and leaders on campus as well as in the surrounding Boulder community.Ìý

We also will be imagining and energizing a common framework for sustainability education across CU Boulder as we support faculty development of a sustainability minor across all schools, colleges and divisions to achieve a unique breadth of sustainability education for students here. The CU Boulder community can also expect us to work to identify, uplift and encourage experiential learning across sustainability education, including robust employer relationships that will yield strong job and post-graduation outcomes as we collaborate on student recruitment efforts to attract students who want a world class sustainability education here at CU Boulder.