fragile oasis

Do One Thing

DOT stands for “Do One Thing”. A DOT is a practice of sustainability where your personal passions and your daily routine unite. It's as simple as making yourself and the people around you committed to developing daily habits that will impact the world in a sustainable way. It’s about the collective impact of billions of small actions. It's about big thinking and small changes. It's about opportunity instead of obligation.

DOT is a project of the Syracuse University Students in Free Enterprise (SU SIFE) team in partnership with Saatchi & Saatchi S. DOT was originally started as True Blue, an initiative developed by Saatchi as an engagement tool for employees at Walmart. It was then adapted for college campuses by the Net Impact team at William & Mary College.

The SU SIFE team has been working since early November 2010 to begin implementing DOT on the Syracuse University campus. The goal of SU SIFE was to create a model that could be used to implement DOT on a campus with a large student population (20,000 students at Syracuse University). A major part of this implementation included the design and development of an online platform, DOTonCampus.com, where students can easily submit their individual DOTs. This online platform is easily and readily scalable to other universities, regardless of the size of their student population, and provides a simple way to measure the total commitments of students on any given campus. To date, students, faculty and staff members at Syracuse University have pledged over 900 DOTs.

DOT is expanding quickly across the country, and actively seeking out more student groups interested in implementing the DOT program on their campus. Currently, The George Washington University is the only other school tying into the online platform, but talks are ongoing with several other schools including: Washington University in St. Louis, Penn State University, New York University, University of Arizona, and Louisiana State University.