Project overview

Columbus Council on World Affairs facilitated a multi-school, multi-discipline educational project around the topic of Environmental Sustainability. This was accomplished by bringing together students from area schools and other local stakeholders for their mutual benefit. It involved the use of math, science, social studies, and art. It connected students labeled as having"special educational needs" and those enrolled in advance AP coursework. The project had positive outcomes for young leaders, their future employers, local non-profit organizations, and the planet! You might be thinking I am exaggerating. I'm not. This blog will detail the hows and whys of the project. You'll hear about the good, the bad, and the smelly!

Council Fellows role
We began the project by advising our after-school group of high school leaders (we call them Council Fellows) that they would be the core leaders working to address a global issue of their choosing. They were told they would reach out to community partners and peers at area schools to assist them. Our youth programs staff helped Council Fellows members to brainstorm concepts, conduct research, decide on specific goals they would like to the project to achieve, imagine the steps and resources needed, become acquainted with new tools for accomplishing tasks, refine and adapt to circumstances and obstacles...and generally pointed them in the right direction so that they could eventually taste the fruits of their labor!

So, what was it exactly that they were trying to do? The mission of Council Fellows is to "solve global actions through local actions." In the past group's mission? Solve global issues through local actions. The issue? Global climate change is partly the result of wasteful, expensive, and thoughtless daily practices of Ohio citizens and consumers. The local solution? 1. Select a specific neighborhood in our Columbus community (in this case, the organziations comprosing the block known as "Jefferson Center for Learning and the Arts" or JCLA), 2. find out the current attitudes, habits, and concerns of people working in that neighborhood, 3. use their responses to calculate the impacts to the planet, and 4. suggest changes that these individuals, and the organizations they work for, can make to lessen that impact.

Council Fellows members worked diligently on the project for several months and also organized the culminating event of this project, The Green Games. Their main job was to gather information that their peer partners at area schools could use to complete their portions of the project, and to put all of the information they gathered into perspective.

Classroom outreach
Individual classroom teachers at these schools -- Linden-McKinley and Mifflin high schools, and Duxberry Elementary -- welcomed me (as youth ed staff at CCWA) into their classrooms to co-facilitate math, science, art, and social studies components that would make the project a reality.

Community partners
To get all of this done, we recruited help from individuals and organization representatives of all ilks! For example, COTA helped with the Mifflin portion, to provide local public transportation data for use by the students for the project's math component. MORPC demonstrated energy inefficiencies as a Green Games exhibition. Chef's at Nationwide arena collected and helped load leftover produce into our cars, in order to allow LMHS students to experiement with compost, and local businesses donated prizes to incentivize "good behavior" among employees at the orgs on JCLA's campus.