J.P. Leous,’06, and Neal Parry,’06, arrived at SIPA in May 2005, Leous by way of the Peace Corps and Parry via a year’s trip around the world. Both came to the MPA program “hungry to do other things,” as Parry says, especially things related to sustainability.

Now, 18 months later, the two have not only contributed to the university’s vision and planning around an increasingly sustainable campus, but also have helped create a graduation award at SIPA for a paper or project dealing with an interdisciplinary approach to environmental stewardship.

Leous and Parry first met around an orientation table. Parry says he remembers their first brainstorming session on July 22, 2005 – part of their Quantitative Techniques course. The group assignment for the term was to design and implement a survey that as the course name indicates, would produce quantitative results.

“Our group decided to focus on environmental sustainability on campus. Columbia is a powerhouse institution – there aren’t a lot of similar places in major urban areas.

We wanted to know what is Columbia currently doing, how are they doing it and what are the attitudes involved,” Leous says.

“From there,” he says, the group realized the basis for their survey was qualitative rather than quantitative, that only “yes” or “no” answers would not produce the results they sought.

Steven Cohen, environmental policy studies program director, and Ion Bodan Vasi, their course professor, “allowed us to do this project slightly outside the model,” Leous says.

The six group members grounded the survey in a 1987 U.N. Commission definition of sustainability – “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Then they interviewed 20 “key university stakeholders” from facilities, administration and faculty.

“Our intention was really to chat with key decision-makers who, if they would say, ‘I want it to happen,’ it would happen,” Parry says.

The group’s findings, reduced to lowest terms: “Columbia has much of what it needs to be a leader in campus environmental sustainability. The problem is that all these resources aren’t aligned to be optimized,” Parry says. “Senior Executive Vice President Robert Kasdin and the Environmental Stewardship Taskforce, to which our survey results have contributed, are taking important steps in taking pieces and aligning them.”

About the same time Parry and Leous were deeply involved with the group survey, they realized they might stoke their sustainability passion from another perspective, this time by entering a piece in the Andrew Wellington Cordier fall ’05 essay contest, whose topic was “Politics of the Sea.” The SIPA-sponsored contest was created in honor of Cordier, the former SIPA dean.

Over the summer, Leous had studied U.S. legislation regarding marine debris. Leous says he suggested to Parry that they “tweak what I learned and enter the contest.”

Their essay, “Who’s Responsible for Marine Debris? The International Politics of Cleaning Our Oceans,” was the winner.

Besides publication in “The Journal of International Affairs,” there was a $300 award.

Leous and Parry spent the last half of the spring term thinking about what to do with the money. They concluded that although “it’s great to throw parties, why don’t we do something with it.”

And with that conclusion came the first steps in making their sustainability commitment tangible – the Leous/Parry Award for Progressive Sustainability that will be given for the first time in ’07 at the SIPA graduation. Entries must be in the form of an essay or project that addresses a global environmental issue and suggests an interdisciplinary solution.

“So many world issues are based in environmental concerns,” Leous says. “We want this prize to catalyze individuals to work together. It seems like an MPA ‘fit,’ as the spirit behind the award is to have those students working with colleagues in other fields – all of which emphasizes the broadness of the environment.”

Leous says SIPA Dean Lisa Anderson “loved it.” Other groups have contributed to the award fund that now exceeds $1,200.

Leous, a native of Buffalo where he now lives, graduated from Allegheny College in Meadville, Penn., in 2000. A subsequent banking job led him to realize he “wanted a more purpose-driven life.” Today, Leous is a research analyst for “Final Hour,” a Discovery Channel series on poverty and climate change scheduled for release in 2008.

He served in the Peace Corps in Grenada for two years, the “best way I could contribute to society,” he says. A succession of experiences, particularly with the aftermath of Hurricane Ivan, “helped me realize very quickly that the environment is where my passions and skill set could further my career.”

Leous says he needed more “hard skills and to put myself in a community where folks knew this stuff.” That community was SIPA.

Parry has recently begun a job with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, based in suburban Washington, D.C. He’s working in a marine debris program that’s 98 percent Katrina-related, and spends a considerable amount of time in the hurricane-stricken region of the Gulf Coast.

A Seattle native, Parry also “did lots of things – not environmentally-related” after his graduation in 1997 from Claremont-McKenna College in Claremont, Calif. He worked for the Boeing Corp. for three years, then decided he “needed to do other things.”

A decision to spend a year traveling the world “sparked my interest in not only being able to see things,” he says. “I was at the University of Oslo, where I happened to find a book on ecological economics. It brought together my undergraduate training with a new personal connection to the Earth.”

One more year with a band, playing guitar and banjo and song-writing intervened before Parry arrived at SIPA.

Meantime, besides stepping into new careers, Leous and Parry are working with SIPA, both on the contours of the award they’ve established and ways to increase its funding.