Title:Award winners pursue sustainable initiatives

Supported by the Office of Sustainability and the Earth Commons—Georgetown University’s Institute for Environment & Sustainability—Green Commons Awards are granted to anyone in the Georgetown community for projects related to environmental and sustainability issues in amounts up to $5,000. Winners have gone on to do important work in their early careers.

Emily Javedan (G’24) received the award to fund The True Price of a Mocha, a data-driven website that ranks coffee shops in Georgetown by both price and environmental sustainability.

“Everyday behaviors often influence big environmental systems and, as a daily coffee drinker, this research felt like the perfect crossover point. The Green Commons Award served as an early signal in my professional career that I could independently lead a project from concept to execution,” says Javedan, who works for Guidehouse as an energy and business transformation consultant.

“Leaving Georgetown with a funded, public-facing platform has been valuable as I’ve navigated roles that require both analytical rigor and creative problem-solving,“ says Javedan.

Anya Wahal (SFS’23) won the award to create the short documentary film, Water in the West: The Story of Farming in the Colorado River Basin, following the lives of those affected by the water crisis in Arizona, expanding the subject matter from her senior thesis.

“That project has been a big part of my career. I think it’s why I won two scholarships,” says Wahal, who is currently a Marshall Scholar at Oxford doing her dissertation on semiconductors and drought and prior to that completed a Fulbright Scholarship in India working on water access. “Integrating myself in communities has been a big force for how I view my work in equity,” Wahal says.

Fellow Green Commons Award winner Nadia Sadanandan (H’24) used the stipend to start a Food Recovery Network chapter at Georgetown with her co-founder Daniella Passariello (SFS’23). The national network strives to alleviate food insecurity and food waste by recovering surplus food, helping the climate crisis, and improving community health.

Sadanandan, who is now pursuing an M.D./Ph.D. in cancer immunology at the University of Virginia, believes the award strengthened her application to the programs and “improved my understanding of both the social determinants of health and how food access intersects with systemic injustice and health disparities.”