03/23/2026
SUNY Cortland’s Employee Assistance Program offers support, referral services and examples on how to host events sustainably. For the last eight years, EAP has distributed reusable tableware during events such as their sponsored lunches. This year, the committee’s sustainable promotional items are bowl scrapers and measuring spoons.
The goal of EAP, according to the NYS Office of Employee Relations is to, “enhance employee well-being, increasing productivity, and improving morale in the workplace.” With this in mind, the EAP committee launched the sustainable promotional items, “they are a great team that is always looking forward with promotional items that appeal to our campus community members,” commented maintenance supervisor and EAP coordinator Rick Nauseef.
“At the potato lunch in February, a participant said, ‘you all have matching bowls’ because the attendees brought their EAP bowls and cutlery with them to the lunch, and they were further delighted when EAP offered them a bowl and cutlery set of their own.”, reflected program aide of the Student Conduct Office and EAP committee chair Athena Vunk-Moynihan. A culture of sustainability and the norm of bringing reusables is in place at EAP lunches, with attendees bringing cutlery sets from 2024, a salad bowl from 2019 and lunch bag distributed by EAP more than nine years ago.
“EAP has been looking at sustainable and useful promotional items for quite some time. In addition to recognizing the importance of sustainability, purchasing disposable cutlery and plates/bowls for our lunch events was also becoming expensive,” stated Vunk-Moynihan.
For more information about the EAP program and information on upcoming events, check out the website.