The Off Campus Student Safety Lighting Project - See student feedback below!
Our goal
Where we got the financial support
What we have done
Where we are now
We are very excited to have the opportunity to increase the safety of our students and community at the Ohio State University, and will be keeping our supporters updated throughout our journey!
- We plan to help students, single women, and elderly couples living in the University District to feel safer in their neighborhoods and more at home in this wonderful city.
- We are hoping to achieve this by installing 30 to 35 solar powered, motion activated security lights
Where we got the financial support
- We were awarded a $1000 grant from the Coalition for a Non-Violent Columbus.
- We were awarded a $1000 matching grand from the Ohio State Undergraduate Student Government
What we have done
- We tested five potential lights for maximum efficiency, durability, and ease of install.
- Based on the results of the testing, we picked the Sunforce 60 LED light
Where we are now
- We have installed 18 lights so far! We have plans to install 12 more!!
We are very excited to have the opportunity to increase the safety of our students and community at the Ohio State University, and will be keeping our supporters updated throughout our journey!
Highlights!
Testimonials
1) I have really enjoyed having the solar lights. They make it more safe and its nice not having to turn them on and off because people frequently forget to turn off the lights in the apartment which wastes energy. I think they would be a great option around campus because they would turn off when people are not near by.
2) I really like those solar lights in our backyard so thank you for those.
3) The lights were a good idea, but I didn't think they were bright enough to make a difference. In one of the dark alleys, the light would turn on, but it would make virtually no difference in the brightness of the alley... so I didn't really feel any safer with them around.
4 ) I'm not the strongest subscriber to the belief that night lights are going to ward off crime in a building or area, but that being said, I also don't think keeping an area well-lit hurts the odds of having a crime-free night. Since I'm not overly enamored with the thought of security lights (and perhaps also the thought of someone having to spend money on them), I do enjoy the idea of using solar lights. Although I realize that solar lights are probably more expensive to buy at the outset, I really like that once they're set up, they will pretty much just do their thing without having to expend any extra electricity on them.
I like that they harness and reuse a natural resource that we tend to take for granted even though it's available to us every single day; in fact, I tend to support any efforts towards using natural and easily renewable resources. It makes so much sense to use resources like the sun and wind when it's always just right there slapping us in the face. Again, I realize that such sustainable energies are likely to be more expensive to harness and use at first, but I think the overall benefits (and perhaps cost effectiveness) outweigh the disadvantages, especially the longer they are used.
I would be thrilled if more areas of campus had solar lights, just as I'm thrilled when I find that a plastic I'm using is made of corn, or that a company uses some percentage (especially high percentages) of renewable energy resources to power their operations, or that a business recycles or donates its trash/waste/leftovers. As my mother-in-law would point out, it's good karma; it's also good for the environment, which is to say, it's good for anyone who lives on the planet Earth. I think it's very exciting to watch others take steps in the right direction - even seemingly little steps can quickly add up and become a mainstream movement or way of life - and having that nice little solar light tacked on to the side of my building is a perfect example of exactly that.