The Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) awarded UW–Madison’s Earth Fest a 2025 CASE Circle of Excellence Award. Developed and hosted by the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Office of Sustainability, Earth Fest is UW-Madison’s annual celebration of the environment and sustainability. For its inaugural year (2024), Earth Fest received the “gold” award for Special Events: Multi-Day (In-Person).
Held annually, the CASE Circle of Excellence awards honor outstanding and innovative efforts in educational advancement. The 2025 award entries spanned 33 countries and 640 institutions. “The Circle of Excellence Awards shine a spotlight on the extraordinary creativity, passion, and innovation demonstrated by advancement professionals at institutions around the world,” says Sue Cunningham, CASE President and CEO.
In just two years, Earth Fest has become a hallmark celebration of environmental and sustainability education and engagement on the UW–Madison campus. Its first year featured nearly 50 events across nine days, attracting more than 7,000 students, faculty and staff, alumni, and community members Organized around three pillars — inspire, educate, and motivate — Earth Fest both supercharged environmental programming at UW–Madison and also served as a campuswide platform for engaging with the university’s ambitious new sustainability goals. Its growth has paralleled and supported the development of UW–Madison’s new sustainability goals, offering a public-facing anchor for shared work across campus. Earth Fest’s “gold” award recognizes not only its impact on campus, but its creation of a scalable model for cross-campus programming for institutions worldwide.
“Every corner of UW–Madison shows this is an ‘Earth campus,’” says Paul Robbins, Dean of the Nelson Institute. “Restoration principles are applied to groundskeeping; sustainability is core to our engineering expertise; environmental history and writing are thriving; the dance program celebrates the planet; our agricultural research preserves soils and sequesters carbon. Earth Fest celebrates all that excellence — and does it in partnerships with community partners across the state. This is all too big for a single Earth Day.”
Earth Fest was a collaborative development between the Nelson Institute and the Office of Sustainability to unify two long-standing but disconnected initiatives — the Nelson Institute’s Earth Day Conference (est. 2008), which targeted alumni and was held off campus, and the Office of Sustainability’s Earth Week celebration (est. 2018), which featured on-campus, student-led programming. The results were immediate: the 2024 boasted nearly 50 events, hosted by 35-plus schools, colleges, units, and student groups. Compared to previous Earth Day and Earth Week user engagement, web traffic surged over 600 percent, Instagram reach soared to 761.9K users — up 1,400 percent from the previous year — and earned media pickups quadrupled. Recent Earth Day Conferences and Earth Week celebrations saw 200 to 500 attendees each, while Earth Fest drew more than 7,000, proving the power of a unified approach.
This is the first CASE Circle of Excellence Award for both the Nelson Institute and the Office of Sustainability. UW–Madison received one other award this year: a “silver” award (news/feature writing) for “Phantom Finders,” a story by the College of Letters & Science.
Related Stories
- At UW–Madison Earth Fest, Thousands Come Together to Celebrate the Planet — and Ensure Its Future https://sustainability.wisc.edu/at-uw-madison-earth-fest-thousands-come-together-to-celebrate-the-planet-and-ensure-its-future/
- The Highs, Lows, and Woahs of Earth Fest 2024 https://nelson.wisc.edu/the-highs-lows-and-woahs-of-earth-fest-2024/
- Earth Fest Kickoff: Celebrating sustainability progress https://news.wisc.edu/earth-fest-kickoff-celebrating-sustainability-progress/
- How to Build Climate Courage https://nelson.wisc.edu/how-to-build-climate-courage/
Want to get involved in or contribute to Earth Fest 2026? Contact our team at earthfest@nelson.wisc.edu.