This exercise invites students to explore what it means to take an asset-based approach to community development (“an ABCD” approach), versus a “needs” or “deficit” approach. Students are broken into groups and given a description of a community.
Browse our tools by Category, Type, Big Ideas, and/or Time Commitment, for example, or simply feel free to explore the options below. We also invite you to contribute by adding your own tools that you’ve successfully tried in your classrooms.
Exploring Asset-Based Community Development: A Tale of Two Cities
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Introduction to SLS & Sustainable Communities
This tool, intended to be used towards the beginning of the semester, helps instructors frame their course to students in relation to SLS and our mission of educating students to help “create sustainable communities.” It also prompts students to begin exploring additional opportunitie
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"Ever the Land" Living Building Documentary: A Guided Reflection
Ever the Land is an internationally acclaimed documentary film about Te Kura Whare, the fully certified Living Building built by the Tūhoe, a Māori tribe of northern New Zealand. The Tūhoe built Te Kura Whare as a public community center and tribal heritage archive.
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Kendeda Building Participatory Design Game
This tool adapts the Smart Cities Kit to Georgia Tech’s Living Building, the Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design.
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Technology and Social Context
This tool helps students understand how social context can influence the success or failure of projects; as a result, students will learn to design their own projects, both local and abroad, with attention to the context and the communities in which they’re working.
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SLS Case Study: The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design
The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design at Georgia Tech promises to be a flexible, multi-use academic space as well as the most environmentally advanced educational and research building in the Southeast.
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Smart Cities Kit
The Smart Cities Kit is a set of hands-on materials that supports collaborative scenario building activities. These activities can foster a greater understanding of smart-cities as socio-technical systems.
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Atlanta Map Room: Rethinking the Way Data Represents the Places We Live
The goal of the Map Room project is to develop local spaces for grassroots map-making, where people can creatively and collaboratively explore data. Conventional digital maps help people see rapid, large-scale social and environmental changes as they unfold.
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SLCE Nuts & Bolts
“What strategies and resources are available to me to integrate community engagement into my teaching?”
This section of the toolkit is your answer. It offers you guidance about service learning and community engagement (SLCE) organized into the eight categories below. In addition, a repository of Community Engagement Action Guides can be found at the bottom of this page. It is a living resource, and we will be updating it frequently. Please contact Ruthie Yow, SLS Service Learning and Partnerships Specialist (ruth.yow@gatech.edu) with your ideas for improving it!
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Society, Equity, and Sustainability
SLS approaches sustainability as an integrated system, linking environment, economy, and society.
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SLS Case Study: Proctor Creek
Proctor Creek runs through northwest Atlanta, extending from I-20 in southwest Atlanta to the Chattahoochee River. An important piece of Atlanta’s natural environment, it also has a long history of neglect and pollution, which has negatively affected its surrounding communities.
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Civic Data Guides: Thinking Critically about Digital Public Records
Over the past decade public institutions have put considerable resources towards improving the quality and availability of civic data, such as budget and expenditure information, building permits, air quality readings, police incidents, and property ownership records.
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Stratification Monopoly: A Comparative Perspective
Some of the major challenges in teaching about economic inequality and mobility are a) understanding the differences between income and wealth, as well as other types of economic resources; b) encouraging students to be empathetic to those who have a different economic standing than their own; c)
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Environmental Justice 101
Environmental Justice (EJ) is concerned with making sure that (a) no community takes on an unfair share of environmental burdens and (b) environmental benefits are shared in an equitable way regardless of race, class, gender, or orientation.
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Mobile Journalism: Documenting Equitable and Inclusive Communities
This tool facilitates meaningful discussions on equity through the lens of mobile journalism and documentary filmmaking. Part I consists of a series of short, documentary-style videos that attempt to illustrate how a building, or any physical space, can be inclusive and equitable for everyone.
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ReGenesis Case Study: Creating a Sustainable Community through Collaborative Problem-Solving
This tool uses the ReGenesis case study from Spartanburg, South Carolina, to explore what it means to “create sustainable communities” through broad stakeholder engagement.
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Urban Heat Islands and the Georgia Tech Climate Network
Extreme heat leads to more deaths in the US than all other natural disasters combined, and as global temperatures rise, so will the dangers.
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SLS' Anti-Racism Resource List for Teaching, Learning, and Acting to "Create Sustainable Communities" During this Time of Transformation
Our world is in the midst of incredible change - change that Georgia Tech faculty, staff, students, and partners want to teach about, learn about, and engage in, both inside and outside the classroom. SLS has started this list to compile and share the best resources coming our way.
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SLS Resource List: U.N. Sustainable Development Goals
The Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain aims to help students create sustainable communities, where humans and nature flourish in the present and future.
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Introduction to Equitable and Sustainable Development
This tool uses the Atlanta BeltLine project to introduce students to key concepts in Equitable and Sustainable Development, particularly as it pertains to large infrastructure projects.
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Serve-Learn-Sustain Land Acknowledgment
SLS Land Acknowledgment
Please rise in body or spirit. Take a moment to connect to this space.
We acknowledge and give gratitude for the Muskogee land we stand on today. These lands are unceded territory from which the Muskogee were forced.
We acknowledge the enslaved people who were brought to this land against their will.
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SLS Resource List: Teaching with the SDGs Workshop Materials
The Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain aims to help students create sustainable communities, where humans and nature flourish in the present and future. Toward that aim, SLS supports faculty to incorporate Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) into their teaching.
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SLS Resource List: Education for Sustainable Development
The Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain aims to help students create sustainable communities, where humans and nature flourish in the present and future. Toward that aim, SLS supports faculty to incorporate Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) into their teaching.
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SLS Fellows Program
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Fundamentals of Equity in the Sustainable Built Environment
This tool introduces students to the different ways in which equity can be deeply embedded in the design of the built environment, in different phases from beginning to end. It encourages students to consider equity more comprehensively as a foundational component of sustainability.
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