From shouting at Keystone XL protests in Washington D.C., to urging the college to divest its endowment from fossil fuels, and everything in between, the Sunday Night (Environmental) Group has been a home for climate organizers at Middlebury for two decades. In January 2005, several MiddKids found themselves in Jon Isham’s J Term class about social change and the climate movement. Students wanted to continue these conversations and invite more people into the room. On January 26th, 2o05, they gathered in the Chateau lounge and from then on, the group has meet every Sunday for twenty years.
There have been changes to the location and the name and the official student organization status, but the ethos of the group has always remained; one of care for the environment and passion to take action. The non-hierarchical nature of the group means members can be as involved as they would like. Ideas and planning have come from all who have attended a meeting. The sense of community brings people back every week and has kept the club thriving past challenges like a ‘no’ to a campaign or the pandemic.
When plans began in October 2024 for what would eventually become the What Works Now? conference, current members were prioritizing institutional memory. Creating a living record of this club was just as important as celebrating twenty years worth of accomplishments and lessons learned. This site is a place to maintain the record, learn from our past, and apply it to the future of climate action at Middlebury and beyond.
“Working on this history project has meant so much to me! SN(E)G has been an amazing community for me throughout my time at Middlebury and I’m so incredibly proud to be a part of something, many of us consider, larger than ourselves. This institutional knowledge work has been taken on by others before me and will surely be tackled again; I only hope they can use what I’ve completed as a foundation. Thank you to all those who have supported this project, from submitting photos, to being interviewed, or helping conjure up the idea in the first place!”
~ Ella Powers ’27