Week Eleven

This week was the final week of my internship in which I finalized the working parts of the survey to make sure all of the skip logic aligned with the different parts of the survey. Later in the week, I began to say my goodbyes to the wonderful people that I had met in the Office of Sustainability and the Environment. They shared some last goodbyes and wishes for my future. Over the duration of this internship, I had shared the office with two other interns who helped me various times throughout my time there. They had been working on different projects within the office. On my last day, we ventured to the area around city hall to have lunch at a local restaurant.

When I came back from our lunch, I then had my final meeting with Mr. Bruskotter. We reviewed and revised the various parts of the survey ensuring the language was more appropriate for the different professional service providers. He asked questions of me such as, "How do I add and subtract questions?", and, "How do I use the different parts of skip logic throughout the survey?" I changed the account into his name and left the survey to his own devices. He thanked me for all of my insight and the work that I put in. We promised to catch up after my fall semester and that he would keep me in the loop about our work together.

Week Ten

Our expert on the Living Building Challenge, Joel, met with us early in the week to discuss some of the similar topics my supervisor and I used during our conference call with Shawn. We wanted to now if there was any existing thought regarding questions already being asked of the sustainability of professional services previously purchased by the city. In the meeting, Joel shared some of his frustration in the contracted services prior to his employment. Joel informed us that the city was now requiring all new buildings being drafted for construction must undergo LEED certification at the gold level. However, nothing was being asked about how these services carry out their internal operations. From our meeting, I established some questions to directly use for the architectural, engineering, construction, and landscaping services. I then began to work on the survey in which was the end goal for this project. I created an account on survey monkey to make a draft that could be sent to potential professional services. 

I utilized skip logic so these services would not undergo survey fatigue. This topic of survey fatigue was used over and over again in the Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Council's Summer Summit that my supervisor attended prior to my internship. By using this type of logic, service providers taking the survey would only answer the questions that pertained to them. By doing so, I hoped to avert any reluctance to answering the survey in full. 

Week Nine

This week we received some more feedback about the vendor surveys that were listed on the Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Council's website. One of the procurement officials who wished to hold a meeting with Mr. Bruskotter and I, decided on a time this week to discuss some of her personal experiences with the survey. Upon calling, I drafted several questions concerning the type of feedback the survey received, the qualifying and evaluation criteria, and several others of that nature. Our discussion was beneficial as Shawn, the procurement official from Multnomah County, gave us insight into their advanced policies regarding sustainability. Unlike the City of Santa Monica, the procurement office in Multnomah is deeply invested in sustainability.

After the conversation, we then established our next plans of action. We would use some of the insight about her trials and tribulations of working with people who do not have a background in sustainability and how they encouraged their professional services to hold high expectations when considering a particular vendor. From this, we determined that we should meet internally with one our experts who has been assigned the project of integrating the Living Building Challenge into the City of Santa Monica. The Living Building Challenge integrates making all new building projects to live up to the expectations of different levels of LEED certifications.

Week Eight

This week I was assigned the task of going through the list of services from the list I composed on planet bids and picking out the reoccurring contact information from the different services. By doing so, I was able to create a contact list of department officials that the Office of Sustainability should meet with to discuss the sustainability of our professional services throughout the different departments. Aside from this, I was then directed to see if there was best management practices within the various fields of sustainability. Some of the major services provided by the city in the past several years revolved around the services related to architecture, construction, engineering, and landscaping. Because the city has placed a high emphasis on making their supply chain more sustainable, it was important to research these services to ensure there was a best practice in these fields.

Upon research, I found some brief descriptions of the best management practices. While there was less information for some, there was enough information to start a conversation between the contacts and my supervisor about where we can require certain sustainable elements. The City of Santa Monica procures goods and services based on, "best values," as opposed to the lowest bidder. This allows these discussions to take place without the fear of immediate rejection from the purchasing and public works department.

Week Seven

This week consisted of looking at the professional service section under the new guidance on the Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Council. On the website of the SPLC Community, there were example surveys presented by cities in Oregon and Nova Scotia. I composed a list of pros and cons for each of the surveys in which Mr. Bruskotter and I were aiming to eventually hand out to the vendors to collect more data regarding the sustainable practices which they engage in. From analyzing these charts and the responses we received from the week prior, I started to look into some of the options for carrying out the survey.

Later on in the week, the Office of Sustainability offered for me to take part in the City's summer Olympics and represent their team. It was a nice break from the many hours of research that I had been putting in to create a prototype of the survey. My supervisor and I met up afterwards in our local coffee shop to discuss some of the charts that I had made from the Planet Bids website. From this we established priority lists for the city in terms of which professional service could have a significant environmental impact. We then planned to make a list of contact information for the members within the different departments that the city was going out to bid on for these specific services.

Week Six

This week was composed of looking into some of the templates presented in the Guidance 2.0 on the SPLC website. I compared the benefits and drawbacks of the three different types of surveys and found some similarities between the two. The City of Santa Monica has looked into various parts of the risks and emissions of some of their goods but has put less emphasis on their professional services. Mr. Bruskotter and I composed several emails to the procurement officers that composed the sample survey types. We asked them about their strategy in composing these surveys and other questions about the feedback in which they received from these surveys.

From these emails, we got responses from the procurement officers within Nova Scotia as well as Multnomah County in Oregon. The procurement officer in Nova Scotia explained some of the benefits as well as some of the negative responses that they received from the surveys. The procurement officer from Multnomah County had sent us an email wishing to set up a conference call to explain her experience with the survey. She mentioned that in the weeks to come she would be on vacation, but would hope to set this up sometime in the future. We took notes on some of the emails and decided to deeply analyze the surveys for their assets and areas on uncertainty.

Week Five

This week was focused on the relevant case studies presented at the SPLC's Summer Summit. We met briefly to discuss the ones that may be interesting for us to learn from in proceeding in our project. From this, I read over some of the case studies that we had decided upon. I made notes on these topics as well as picking out highlights from them. There were case studies ranging from ways to consume less paper up and down the supply chain as well as how to integrate responsible mining into procurement agendas. I also attended a webinar with Mr. Bruskotter regarding Green Peace's work on sustainable palm oil. From the webinar, I learned that they work in engaging collaboration with their suppliers to carry out best practices during the extraction process.

This week also marked the first staff meeting that I was invited to attend. The meeting started off with brief snippits of what was going on in our personal lives before we attended to the business side of things. Garrett and Mikael, two of the members of the climate action team, presented the almost final version the city's Climate Action Plan. They found that they reduced overall emissions of 19.8 percent from the previous action plan. One of their largest setbacks was in the city's Big Blue Bus program as there was an increase in use of single-mode transportation due to lower gas prices. While gas has been reached an all-time low in recent years, the city hopes that pushing for reductions in emissions across the board will encourage residents to become a part of their reduction goals. We went around the table discussing our various projects. The meeting ended with the update from our Chief Sustainability Officer, Dean Kubani, who discussed his meeting with the City Manager and his desire to make major changes regarding impact of the city's offices across the board.