In Dekalb County, the refugee resettlement community of Clarkston is known as the most diverse square mile in America. Here, many parents work long hours and late shifts, and a high percentage of families have only one car or less. Because of this lack of time and transportation, taking their children to after-school activities can often be a challenge.
This summer, six Clarkston teens took part in a pilot program at Georgia Tech aiming to improve mobility options. The four-week Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) institute was led by Assistant Professor Allen Hyde in the School of History and Sociology, along with Clarkston community partner UPPER90 and GT sustainability initiative Serve-Learn-Sustain (SLS), which provided funding. Program assessment was carried out by …
Each summer, SLS runs a paid internship program that focuses on providing practical experience for students in supporting solutions for sustainable communities, while providing our partners with support and resources. Below we highlight the experience of two students from our Summer 2020 program, whose internship experiences translated into staff positions with their internship host partner.
Rachel Dekom, (History, Science, and Technology, 2021)
My internship with Carrie’s Closet of Georgia was extremely challenging, but so rewarding. I was Carrie’s Closet’s first intern, and I was tasked with getting the newly-formed advocacy component of the organization off the ground. It was difficult, especially during a global pandemic, to start a significant child welfare advocacy push from the ground up. But although there are challenges inherent in being a small grassroots…
This past summer, I had the opportunity to intern with the UrbanHeatATL team. UrbanHeatATL is a community partnership between researchers at Georgia Tech and Spelman College, local partner organizations, and community scientists. The goal of UrbanHeatATL is to map accurate, surface-level heat data in Atlanta. In March, UrbanHeatATL presented a panel of urban heat experts during the Atlanta Science Festival (Dr. Marshall Shepherd, Dr. Jeremy Hoffman, and Dr. Jalonne White-Newsome). The experts shared important insight on what causes urban heat, what can be done to mitigate heat, and how communities in Atlanta are affected by the urban heat island effect. While I found the panel informative, I (and a few other UrbanHeatATL interns) noticed it was missing input from community members with firsthand experiences of Atlanta's urban heat island.
To better incorporate community voices into UrbanHeatATL’s work, I…
What is community-based social innovation? What does it look like in action? Where does it happen and how do I get involved?
Students in the SLS Internship Program and the IGniTe summer program’s sustainable communities track were invited to ask- and answer – these questions through their June 26th tour with Director of Impact, Daphne Fowler, at Global Grower’s Decatur-based community garden. Founded in 2010, Global Growers is a Georgia-based nonprofit that partners with more than 300 farmers from diverse backgrounds, including ‘community growers’ who farm on small plots for their families and ‘commercial growers’ who farm to sell at local marketplaces. Global Growers focuses particularly on refugee, immigrant, black, and indigenous growers, supporting them in cultivating the vegetables, fruits, and…
My name is Yassin, and I was an undergraduate student at Georgia Tech from 2015 to 2021. I first heard about the Serve Learn Sustain initiative while taking a database systems course. During one of our classes while discussing the vast realm of work opportunities in computer science, our professor encouraged us to use the skills we were learning towards fostering sustainable communities. She said that if we had an interest in such applications, we could find many opportunities through SLS. Although I was not entirely set on my career at the time, I’ve always been passionate about reducing my impact on the natural environment and had no hesitation signing up for the mailing list. Just a few weeks later, I saw an advertisement promoting an SLS Buzz Course on Universal Design for Sustainable Communities, so I jumped at the chance to learn more about the field! I would soon begin to learn that sustainability encompasses so many more aspects of life beyond natural resources.
The…
Georgia Tech recently achieved a STARS silver rating by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). STARS stands for Sustainability Tracking, Assessment, and Rating System and is awarded based upon measured success in five key areas of sustainability in higher education – Academics, Engagement, Operations, Planning and Administration, and Innovation and Leadership. The rating system helps benchmark achievements and identify opportunities where faculty, administrators, staff, and students can be effective change agents.
Each year, the ANAK Society presents the ANAK Award to honor a faculty member who has demonstrated “outstanding service to the Institute and to the student body.” This year's co-recipient was SLS Director Dr. Jennifer Hirsch. The ANAK Society also honored a staff recipient for the first time this year, presenting the award to Dr. Benjamin Holton as well. Read more about the award HERE.
SLS partnered last month with Summer and Special Sessions Initiatives to offer iGniTe students an in-person tour of the Kendeda Building. Summer and Special Sessions intern, Lily Arnold, wrote about her experience on the tour:
Recently I had the opportunity to take an official tour of the Kendeda Building here on campus. Before going on this tour, the only thing I knew about the building was the foamy toilets. I didn’t know how they worked or anything like that, just that they foamed up over your deposit and whisk it away unlike a traditional toilet and what I refer to as its WOOSH. Once before the tour I took a solo visit to Kendeda & ended up…
Atlanta has one of the largest wealth gaps in the United States, and it is a racialized one: as of 2017, almost 75 percent of residents living below the poverty line were Black. Sustainable development efforts like the Atlanta BeltLine have been exacerbating inequalities since well before COVID-19. Known as a Black mecca, the region is the birthplace of the Civil Rights movement and also boasts a high concentration of higher education institutions (HEIs) as well as the most Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the country. In 2017, HEIs and other stakeholders banded together to launch a regional network—Regional Centres of Expertise (RCE) Greater Atlanta—that builds on the region's strengths to place equity and justice at the center of sustainable development. This RCE is part of a global network of over 170 United Nations-affiliated RCEs on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) that advance the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through education…
For the past three summers, the SLS internship student cohort has included students in the Smart Community Corps (SCC) program, through our partnership with Partnership for Inclusive Innovation. This summer, using the "pair mode", Georgia Tech SCC students are collaborating with students from other Georgia colleges and universities. Meet the 2021 SCC students HERE.