Dr. Hirsch joined Atlanta's steering committee for the global challenge, "100 Resilient Cities."  Learn more about the challenge and Jenny's role by clicking HERE.

​During the Zika Outbreak, lessons our nation’s leaders learned about proactive response and preventive public health measures after Ebola made little difference in countering the disease, as Congress delayed funding for its efficient control. Experience from carrying out HIV screenings in Haiti to training health workers through mobile apps has taught me the importance of multisectoral cooperation and active innovation in healthcare. A noninterventionist attitude and reluctance to embrace change is unsustainable to meet the global disease threats of today. Furthermore, without the next generation having a holistic understanding of the challenges that plague public health, we will continue losing precious lives that fall through cracks due to ineffective policies and programs. 

Because Georgia Tech is an engineering school with limited engagement in global health, I noticed the robust need to provide opportunities for my peers to adequately prepare for and…

Recently, the Georgia Tech Alumni magazine wrote an article exploring what “sustainability” means. Considering how much buzz (I know, it’s bad, but they make that joke too!) surrounds this word these days, many prominent figures around campus were asked to weigh-in.

Dr. Jennifer Hirsch, the Director of Serve-Learn-Sustain, was one of the campus leaders featured in this article. She describes sustainable communities in a very broad way: “communities where people and nature thrive.” Jennifer describes SLS’s main goal: to develop opportunities for undergraduate students (in all majors) to learn about and engage in creating sustainable communities. She also notes that there are lots of university initiatives focused on sustainability or community, but very few like SLS that operate where the two intersect:

“The Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain (SLS) aims to give Tech’s students the knowledge and inspiration to use their education to make a positive difference in the world…

SLS has a sophomore-level class called Technology and Sustainable Community Development. I coordinated the first offering in Spring 2016, with a team of diverse intellectual characters -- Sabir Khan (Architecture), Betsy DiSalvo (Interactive Computing), Jennifer Hirsch (SLS and City and Regional Planning), Wayne Li (Industrial Design and Mechanical Engineering) and Dan Matisoff (Public Policy).

We used water as a theme throughout the class. The Flint crisis was the backdrop for the development of glossary terms and concepts to understand what was happening and put it into broader perspective. Students chose terms like “safe level of contamination” and “restitution/compensation/restoration.” Students attended a meeting of the Proctor Creek Stewardship Council to observe and learn from a community organization dedicated to “the ecological health of the Proctor Creek Watershed Basin and the quality of life of all its people.”

…

I had the honor and pleasure to be there when Serve-Learn-Sustain officially opened in January 2016. During Spring 2016 I had the opportunity to work on new SLS projects - like the Big Ideas - and see their developments from a scratch on a piece of paper to a webpage, exciting!  In the same period, my PUBP-4813 Climate Policy class - in collaboration with the Office of Campus Sustainability - did the first Waste Audit project at GT, sponsored by SLS. It was a valuable and fun experience: students not only collected and sorted trash (!) but they also produced a quantitative analysis of the impacts of waste management on the GT Climate Action Plan.

My SLS experience was so positive that…

The term “smart city” has become common parlance in city planning circles in recent years. While there is no universally agreed upon definition, descriptions of smart cities typically refer to integrated and interoperable networks of digital infrastructure and information and communication technologies (ICT) that collect and share data and improve the quality of urban life (Allwinkle and Cruickshank 2011; Batty et al. 2012). However unlike related concepts such as the digital city, the intelligent city and the ubiquitous city, the smart city is not limited to the diffusion of ICT, but also commonly includes people (Albino, Beradi, and Dangelico 2015).

Many of the technological enhancements propelling the smart city…

The Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain (SLS) recently created a Strategic Advisory Council comprising faculty and staff from around Georgia Tech's campus. The council will meet twice a year and will provide guidance to SLS leadership related to overall strategy and framework development, development of curricular and co-curricular pathways (such as a minor or alternative transcript), and fundraising. Click HERE  for a full list of council members.

…

Promoting Interdisciplinarity, Openness, and Engagement by Carl DiSalvo

On the Difficult, Necessary Work of Leaving the Silo: Avoiding Unintended Consequences by Joe Brown (see below)

In the Fall of 2016, Serve-Learn-Sustain convened its first Fellows program around the theme of Food, Energy, Water Systems, otherwise known by its acronym, FEWS. The program brought together 31 faculty, staff, and graduate students to participate in a series of events and workshops, and work together on collaborative projects of their choosing. The events included field trips to the Emory Water Hub, the Atlanta Community Food Bank, and …

Promoting Interdisciplinarity, Openness, and Engagement by Carl DiSalvo

On the Difficult, Necessary Work of Leaving the Silo: Avoiding Unintended Consequences by Joe Brown (see below)

In the Fall of 2016, Serve-Learn-Sustain convened its first Fellows program around the theme of Food, Energy, Water Systems, otherwise known by its acronym, FEWS. The program brought together 31 faculty, staff, and graduate students to participate in a series of events and workshops, and work together on collaborative projects of their choosing. The events included field trips to the Emory Water Hub, the Atlanta Community Food Bank, and …

Dr. Christian Braneon serves as Assistant Director, Service Learning and Partnerships for the Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain.  He is a water resources engineer specializing in water resources engineering, data science, climate change assessments, and community engagement.