Cal Poly Humboldt is the owner of an 888-acre forest in Jacoby Creek. This forest contains an unknown amount of carbon stored in its trees, which it captures through a process known as sequestration. In 2022, a pilot program (originally called the Jacoby Creek Carbon Inventory) was launched to quantify the carbon present in this forest. The SHIFT Committee originally allocated $61,453 to this effort in the 23-24 AY which resulted in the training of 14 new students and the completion of approximately 30% of the forest inventory.

The Native American Studies Department’s Rou Dalagurr Food Sovereignty Lab and Traditional Ecological Knowledges Institute, Cultural Fire Club, and the NAS Department are leading Returning Good Fire — an Indigenous-led rematriation project restoring cultural burns on California’s North Coast. Guided by cultural fire practitioners and Indigenous students, the project supports habitat restoration, revives culturally significant plants, conserves water, and trains future Indigenous firekeepers.

The Library of Things (LoTs) at Cal Poly Humboldt will provide students with access to tools, equipment, and everyday items that are often too expensive or impractical to own individually. By promoting shared use, reuse, and repair, LoTs reduce waste and support a more sustainable, circular economy. In order to figure out how to best implement this project, the SHIFT Committee has funded a student research position for AY 25-26 that will help figure out how best to navigate the logistical concerns that have and will rise with this project.  

This project entails the creation of an interactive map that has pins on campus showing locations of plants that have ethnobotanical characteristics and relationships. This phase of the project has been completed, and has shifted into a project titled "Place Based Learning Practices Project". See project page here.

Image courtesy of Permaculture Action NetworkThis project proposes researching food forests and permaculture and looking into ways to implement them into communal food security for campus and/or surrounding communities.

This project is an extension of the Ethnobotanical Mapping project (See project page here) and is thus sharing funds. From Karley Rojas, 05/03/2024- "The ‘Place Based Learning Practices Project: a diptych case study of more than human relationality at the tribal and western institutional interface’ is my thesis project, within the Environment and Community graduate program which has adopted the Ethnobotanical Mapping project within its scope.