Club of the Month: Sustainable Agriculture Student Association

Every month we (try to, yes sometimes it just doesn’t end up happening, we’re sorry, please forgive us) feature a KSA club and highlight the fun/cool things that make their club different from the others. It’s a chance to get a little inside information, and see what events and meetings they have coming up.

Our January Club of the Month is the Sustainable Agriculture Student Association!



SASA (Sustainable Agriculture Student Association) is a unique club that caters directly to the students within the Sustainable Agriculture Program. We get together and discuss the program itself, swap textbooks when we can, and search for funding to send students to conferences that are relevant to our program. It isn’t just organizational tool for the Agricultural student body, but also a meeting for point for all the different years to get together and swap ideas, give advice for the program, for minors, for electives, and for course planning, we use it as a tool for our senior students to pass on their wisdom to the new crop of students.



SASA started because students wanted an organization that got all Ag students from all the years together, to have our own Ag specific events, and an organization that connected us all to KPU/KSA, but also to each other. The ability for SASA to fundraise to send students to program relevant conferences is also much greater than what each individual student could achieve, and the conferences that we have been able to send students to has been invaluable. Not only for greater learning in Agriculture, but also for networking, and future research and job opportunities.



SASA is still a pretty green. We haven’t established any major traditions, and events from year to year are always changing. The program itself is still new and evolving, and SASA is always evolving with it. This past year for example, there was extra produce that we usually sell at our farmers market, but due to a location change, there was even more surplus than normal. This led to the opportunity for SASA to sell the produce to their students on campus using a trolley that we took classroom to classroom. One theme, however, which SASA has always been pushing for, is for SODEXO to incorporate more of the student grown produce from our program into their menu. What better way to get the entire student body involved in the Sustainable Agriculture program, than by supporting their fellow students by eating locally student grown fruits and vegetables!

Our first meeting of 2018 is going to be on January 17. This meeting will be held to introduce our new all female executive consisting of President Piper Kenney, Vice-President Lindsay Dodds, Secretary Angeli Dela Rosa, and Treasurer Hazel Chan. We will also be discussing how many students we can send to the next COABC conference (Certified Organic Association of British Columbia) which will be held in Abbotsford in February where our own Kent Mullinix (Director of the Institute of Sustainable Food Systems) is one of the Key note speakers this year. This year their theme is Bioregionalism; resilience in a changing climate.