This semester, Serve-Learn-Sustain gave me the opportunity to attend the AASHE conference, which took place the first week of October, as one of the members of the RCE Greater Atlanta Youth Network. On Monday night, I flew out from the Atlanta airport to Pittsburgh. Upon arriving, I met my roommate for the conference, Iesha, another college student who is active in the RCE Greater Atlanta Youth Network. Although our schools, Georgia Tech and Spelman, are only a few miles away, we met each other for the first time the night in Pittsburgh. Iesha, a fourth year from Spelman, has acted as the school’s campus ambassador for the RCE Youth Network for years, and she had a lot to teach me about its development and how she hoped it would grow.
On Tuesday, Iesha and I attended the Student Summit…
Read the full AY2017-18 Annual Report here.
AY2017-18 was Serve-Learn-Sustain’s third year in operation. During our first two years, we focused on engaging faculty and students across campus in \SLS courses and activities; developing a clear and widely accepted framework for sustainable communities education; developing new partnerships with a diverse set of stakeholders both on campus and off; and establishing and strengthening our administrative, programmatic, and staffing infrastructure. In Year 3, we focused on streamlining and honing these initiatives – and our efforts continued to pay off, as we offered over 140 affiliated courses, including courses in every college, as well as summer courses, GT1000, capstone projects, and study abroad, with total enrollment exceeding 6,000 students.
With our primary program – Affiliated Courses – now well established and running smoothly, we…
Hi! My name is Kaylyn Sinisgalli. I’m a third year Environmental Engineering student with a Spanish minor. Last spring, I was fortunate to be a part of the first student group to embark on the “Serve-Learn-Sustain in Spain” Georgia Tech Faculty-Lead Study Abroad Program. Choosing to step outside of my comfort zone and into Granada is a decision I will never regret.
I entered Tech as a freshman with a desire to be an engineer capable of mixing design with practicality, mixing machine with man. To combine these things as seamlessly as possible, I knew that I had to learn to communicate beyond barriers. I see language as one of the most prominent barriers to the travel of knowledge. To break the language barrier, I knew that I needed to study abroad. The question was no longer to study abroad, but where to go.
I’ve always had an interest in working in…
Marilyn Brown, a Georgia Institute of Technology School of Public Policy Regent’s Professor, and the head of the Climate and Energy Policy Lab speaks with Michael Pearson about the implications of the replacement of the Clean Power Plan with the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE). Read the blog here.
With course selection for the spring comes a slate of exciting SLS-affiliated courses! And in a special twist, we are also sharing the details of a brand new SLS- affiliated study abroad program. Read on and get excited to register!
SLS 3120 Foundations of Sustainable Systems, Beril Totkay, PhD, and Kim Cobb, PhD
Create sustainable communities for the 21st century! Beril Totkay and Kim Cobb are very excited to teach a key SLS class (SLS 3120, Foundations of Sustainable Systems) again in the spring! They designed this course to help students think about the big questions of our day: How can we accelerate progress towards a more sustainable world? How do we create sustainable systems for the 21st century? How do we advance sustainability at multiple scales, including a community, a company, a supply chain, a region, or an entire nation?
Since climate change is such a pressing issue for our times,…
Interested in hearing more from the Equity Champions? Come to the Net Positive Symposium on Tuesday, October 18th, where they will speak on how they have found solutions to making a living building in the hot, humid climate of Atlanta. If you are a student, faculty, or staff at Georgia Tech affiliated with SLS, contact SLS at serve-learn-sustain@gatech.edu about scholarships to the conference.
My name is Janay Jones and I am 3rd year Industrial Design major with a minor in International Affairs. Along with being a Living Building Equity Champion, I am also a Georgia Tech Diversity Ambassador and a United Nations Academic Impact Millennium Fellow. I am thankful for being extended the opportunity to attend the NAACP’s Centering Equity in the Sustainable Sector…
RCE Greater Atlanta will hold its official launch event this Wednesday, October 10th, from 6:30pm - 9:00pm, at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. Please join us - tickets are still available! Click here to register. Serve-Learn-Sustain has a limited number of complimentary tickets for students - please email us for information. Read more in a Saporta Report article published this week. As part of RCE Greater Altanta, our RCE Youth Network is also in full swing and recently held a back-to-school event at the Atlanta Beltline. Read an account of that event by Nathan Lindsey, Graduate Student, Emory…
Interested in social innovation or starting a social enterprise? Not sure where to start? Read about two students' experiences attending The Center for Civic Innovation's Social Enterprise Boot Camp, and then check out the SLS Fall Buzz Course on Social Innovation for Sustainable Communities. Registration Deadline: October 2nd.
This summer, the Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain offered me the opportunity to attend a boot camp. Thankfully, this was not a physical training boot camp in the sweltering heat, but an air-conditioned boot camp offered by the Center for Civic Innovation, focusing on social innovation. Isabella Stubbs, an SLS summer intern, also participated in the workshop. Together, we spent a day learning the basics of creating an organization that successfully…
In the comfortable classroom at the Outdoor Activity Center in Oakland City, there are twenty- three “students” seated in a circle. We are participants in the TransFormation Alliance’s March 2018 Academy, focused on Equitable Transit-Oriented Development. We are quite a mix: brown and white and black, twenty somethings to septuagenarians, native Atlantans to transplants. On one wall is a map, and on another a timeline, sprawling several sheets of butcher paper, charting Atlanta from the 19th century to the present. At the instruction of our facilitator, Dwayne Patterson, all twenty-three of us push our pins into the map, indicating our home neighborhoods, and make sharpie-scrawled entries on the timeline. In the moment, I felt self-conscious about my mark on both. My home neighborhood is almost all white; long gentrified, it…
The Millennium Campus Network (MCN) is a global student network that works to make social impact in the name of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. This year, students will be focusing on improving quality education (SDG 4) and advancing sustainability on 30 campuses around the world.
This summer, 285 schools from around the world applied to be sponsored by the UN Millennium Fellowship. Only 11% of the campuses are accepted, and within these campuses only a select group of fellows are chosen to represent their campus. The 15 to 20 students chosen make up that campus’s cohort, and the Class of 2018 is the first to include a cohort of 18 fellows from the Georgia Institute of Technology. The Georgia Tech cohort is working on a total of eight different projects focusing on equity, education, outreach, environmentalism, and energy efficiency.
The MCN Fellowship now has over 5500 alumni from more…
The Leadership for Social Good Study Abroad Program offers students the opportunity to gain insight into global civil society, learn about the challenges of creating and leading effective and sustainable social enterprises, and make a positive impact by working closely with a non-profit organization in Budapest, Hungary. This program also fulfills the Learn and Engage components of SLS's new Innovating for Social Impact program.
Below read Hannah Schafer's reflection from the program, which focuses on her experiences with "parks and recreation" while abroad. Hannah…
Happy New Semester to All! We are excited to announce our Fall Event Series. This year at SLS, we’re embracing -- and exploring -- the call to “Think Global, Act Local.” Within that broad theme, SLS’s focus this semester is Community Health. It is both our Linked Courses theme, as well as the guiding concept for the Event Series, so you’ll see several health-related events in our calendar. In the list, we have included our own SLS events as well as those sponsored by our partners on and off campus. Along with Community Health, the Event Series engages SLS’s six other Priority Issue Areas: Social Innovation; Climate Change and Energy; Equitable Development; Water, Green Infrastructure, and Citizen Science; Civic Data; and the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.
We have a compelling line-up and can’t wait to see you, share ideas, and build momentum to Create Sustainable Communities…
By: Madeline Smerchansky
It was 4 AM the day after the last day of Spring semester and I was headed to the airport with a group of complete strangers. We were a diverse group of students from all majors and years. After a few sleepy flights and a crowded layover, we had made it to Belize. It was almost the beginning of the rainy season, so the humidity was off the charts and it rained off and on for days. We met our hosts and started on the 4 hour van ride to the EcoLodge, where we were staying.
The organization we were working with in country is called 7 Elements, a service learning organization that emphasizes sustainability and education. 7e worked with a family from a nearby Mayan community to build…
In the program Sustainable Development and Climate Change in Italy, Georgia Tech students spend five weeks living and studying in Venice. While there, students take two SLS affiliated courses and participate in multiple field trips to locations across the country. Students explore how and why climate change is going to affect people, the economy, and the environment all over the world, and experience first-hand the challenges for vulnerable cities like Venice and vulnerable mountain ecosystems in the Italian Alps.
Below, read Mira Kaufman's reflection on her experiences participating in the program.
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Since SLS opened its doors in Spring 2015, students have been asking us – “How can we get involved in SLS?” We have guided them to our extensive list of Affiliated Courses and to our Events & Workshops series, which together reach over 6,000 students/year. These initiatives are continuing – but now, we are excited to announce a new slate of Signature Programs that will allow students to delve deeper into sustainable communities education and experiences, and stay involved over multiple years. The Events & Workshops series is our first program – intended to complement what students are learning in their SLS Affiliated Courses. Here’s more information about the other five programs. We encourage you to check them out!
- The Sustainable Cities Minor,…
This summer, first-year students in the iGniTe Summer Program Sustainability Track who took Dr. Lauren Neefe's ENGL 1102 Architecture, Sound, Sustainability course recorded the sounds of traveling to and walking on the newly completed Proctor Creek Greenway on Atlanta's Westside. The latest portion of the city's renowned infrastructure project, the BeltLine, opened to the public in May 2018 and now confronts the challenge of developing without displacing some of Atlanta's most critically underserved neighborhoods. After studying the Equity Petal of the Living Building Challenge, the students documented the "aural architecture" of their new neighbors' own "living laboratory."
Click…
Professor Stiftel presented at the UN last month as part of the Higher Education Sustainability Initiative (HESI) Global Event that was scheduled as part of the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development. In a panel entitled, “Highlighting innovative collaborations between Higher Education Institutions and the United Nations,” he described the RCE Greater Atlanta as well as Georgia Tech’s Serve-Learn-Sustain program.
Watch a video of his presentation here:
- HESI session (full) is available online at the UN Web TV website here
- This is a 3 hour session. The panel begins about 19:50 into the video and lasts about 75 minutes. Professor Stiftel’s remarks with discussion of SLS and RCE begins at 33:50.
More info about the HESI Global Event is online…
In the Leadership for Social Good Study Abroad Program, students spend eight weeks abroad while learning about social entrepreneurship and the leadership it takes to develop strong civil societies. Students also have the opportunity to work with a nonprofit to help develop sustainable solutions to environmental and social problems.
Below, read Isabelle Musmanno's reflection from the program where she discusses the sustainable practices employed in Budapest, Hungary.
Learn More About the Program >
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Adam Borsch, an SLS Global Student Ambassador, shares moments from his experience in the Netherlands with the Sustainable Transportation Abroad program. Each year, Dr. Kari Watkins teaches a course and takes students on a week long trip to the Netherlands to learn about sustainable transportation. During their week abroad, students bike across the country, experiencing the Dutch transportation system.
Learn more about the Sustainable Transportation Abroad Program >
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The Serve-Learn-Sustain Internship Program’s inaugural summer is well underway! The 17 participating interns are dynamic Georgia Tech students--spanning years and majors-- who are working at a broad variety of organizations and offices, as well as participating in a bi-weekly seminar program run by SLS staff. Below they describe their work and offer some insight into the myriad ways they enact SLS’s mission-- “creating sustainable communities”-- in collaboration with 15 fantastic SLS partners!
Beginning this fall, the internship program will be offered every semester (Fall/Spring/Summer). Interested students should contact Catherine Muse, Community Engagement Specialist, or visit our Internship page for more information.
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