The Minnesota model of a student-led Joint Safety Team (JST) started in 2012 and is still going strong today. Thanks to ongoing support from it's home departments (Chemistry and Chemical Engineering & Materials Science) and industrial partners (Dow Chemical & Valspar). The continuity has been maintained through the perpetual changes inevitable with a grad student population and even through changes in departmental leadership. The safety components are an expected part of these programs and even included as part of recruiting both faculty and students. Graduates of the program often credit their safety leadership skills as the factor that helped them achieve their new positions. These graduates also advocate for their new employers to offer tours to current students highlighting safety practices.

Many of the JST's elements (safety moments, posters, peer inspections etc) are featured in the NAP Safe Science https://www.nap.edu/read/18706/chapter/6?term=jst#90

The website is open to anyone http://jst.dl.umn.edu/home/about-jst

and an article about the program was also published

Student Involvement in Improving the Culture of Safety in Academic Laboratories

Kathryn A. McGarry, Katie R. Hurley, Kelly A. Volp, Ian M. Hill, Brian A. Merritt, Katie L. Peterson, P. Alex Rudd, Nicholas C. Erickson, Lori A. Seiler, Pankaj Gupta, Frank S. Bates, and William B. Tolman

Journal of Chemical Education 2013 90 (11), 1414-1417

DOI: 10.1021/ed400305e

from an EHS perspective I'm fortunate to be supported by leadership who believe in the value of simply being present, building relationships. By attending the various weekly meetings I've available to answer questions and provide context when they pop up instead of relying upon students to take the initiative to call or email. Further we haven't fallen into the apathy of success thanks to our insatiable leaders and members who are always challenging the group to improve.

Anna

On Mon, May 28, 2018 at 10:23 AM, DCHAS Membership Chair <membership**At_Symbol_Here**dchas.org> wrote:

As DCHAS members likely know, one of the components of the ACS Safety Strategy is to "Empower Members and Members Communities". The more specific description of this goal is that "ACS should create strategic partnerships and communities across disciplines to empower chemistry practitioners through development of chemical safety skills."

One of the ways that DCHAS is supporting this strategy is by helping to organize the Developing Graduate Student Leadership Skills in Laboratory Safety Workshop being held at national meetings; we are also working on developing similar workshops at regional ACS meetings.

As we have proceeded with this work, we have recognized that there are many different approaches to this strategy, depending on the culture and resources of the institution involved. Our overall goal is develop a resource that can provide people new to this safety culture work with ideas and guidelines for what has worked well elsewhere. For this reason, we are interested in collecting examples of best practices and other success stories related to building safety cultures in research-intensive academic departments. This collection is necessary because the widely varying approaches to this work mean simple Internet searches are likely to miss good examples.

So if you have direct experience with these safety culture building efforts, whether they are student-, staff-, or faculty- led; if they are called safety committees, Joint Safety Teams, safety partnerships, etc.; or whether they operate primarily in a teaching or research setting; or if you know of a resource that you have found particularly valuable in this work, please let me know so that we can be sure that we don't miss important resources that others should be aware of.

Thanks for any help with this.

- Ralph

Ralph Stuart, CIH, CCHO
membership**At_Symbol_Here**dchas.org

Membership chair
American Chemical Society
Division of Chemical Health and Safety

---
For more information about the DCHAS-L e-mail list, contact the Divisional membership chair at membership**At_Symbol_Here**dchas.org
Follow us on Twitter **At_Symbol_Here**acsdchas

--

Anna Sitek, CSP, CCHO

Research Safety Professional- College of Science & Engineering

Department of Environmental Health and Safety

University of Minnesota- TCEM

Lab Safety Resources www.z.umn.edu/labsafe

Joint Safety Team www.jst.umn.edu

--- For more information about the DCHAS-L e-mail list, contact the Divisional membership chair at membership**At_Symbol_Here**dchas.org Follow us on Twitter **At_Symbol_Here**acsdchas