Red Light, Green Light

A one page decision-making tool developed as a student project helps the City of Olympia, Washington make balanced, transparent decisions supporting increased sustainability, even when the issues involved have many ramifications. You’re invited to try it.

A sustainable community is one that persists over generations and is farseeing enough, flexible enough and wise enough to maintain its natural, economic, social and political support systems. This sustainability vision for the City of Olympia was created by a citizen taskforce in the early 1990s. In 2005, recognizing the need to reinvigorate the City’s sustainability efforts with a focus on tangible action, the City Council adopted the goal of putting sustainability into action as one of its top long-term priorities.

The next year, a group of Department Directors, called the Sustainability Super Team, formed. The team recognized that sustainable action starts with balanced decision-making, and that the City needed a decision-making model to help assess the impacts of any decision on the community as a whole, as well as being easy for all departments to use.

To help develop this model, the City teamed up with the Evergreen State College. Six undergraduate students designed a sustainability decision model as part of a class project. The students named themselves STARS, or Students Toward Achieving Realistic Sustainability. After ten weeks of work, what emerged was the Sustainable Action Map.