Help Us Green America's Schools!

The Green Schools Investment Guide (aka the Toolkit) is getting ready for Greenbuild 2013 Philadelphia where Architecture for Humanity will, in collaboration with the USGBC's Center for Green Schools, lead a charrette-style workshop that introduces the Toolkit and provides working tips for key members of the school community to guide school building investment decisions on their own school turf. 

During this session, participants can expect to gain an introduction and insight into innovative ways to:

1. Outline and champion a path for schools to finance and implement healthy building retrofits, from a pre-retrofit student and school community engagement process to post-upgrade commissioning, operations and maintenance
2. Address various school decision-maker concerns around the costs of building retrofits by incorporating insights into student performance, health and energy efficiency.
3. Easily identify and share successful models for school improvement finance, including key paid-from-savings and traditional school funding approaches, like bond measures and loans
4. Appropriately leverage existing industry-leading resources and tools, such as the LEED Reference Guide for Green Building Operations and Maintenance and relevant LEED Study Guides.

This guide marks the first collaborative product between Architecture for Humanity and the Center for Green Schools at USGBC.  Fundamentally, our vision is simple: to make sure every kid in the United States attends a healthy and inspiring school. Our organizations are working together to create and apply easy-to-use resources that help communities to find ‘right-sized’ investment strategies to transform their schools into clean, safe and resource efficient learning environments. 

As of October 22, 2012 Architecture for Humanity launched a project that puts the fate of the classroom into the hands of the students. Formatted as a three round competition, Guerrilla Green has challenged teens to visualize a plan to improve the spaces within their schools, introduced them to advocacy, and supported their visions by granting up to $13,000 to the most progressive ideas.

This month, May 2013, we’ve concluded the 2013 competition by hand-delivering a $10,000 check to a team of deserving students at the Design and Architecture Senior High School in Miami Florida. The winning team coalesced an in your face water reuse and conservation awareness campaign -- showing students, school administrators and showdown fans how much water is wasted every time someone takes a drink out of a traditional K12 school fountain. To help solve the problem, they built a contraption that collects the wasted water and redistributes it as gray water in their art classes.

To date, the Guerrilla Green competition has directly connected with over 400 students. But our impact reaches far beyond that scope. The teens involved in the competition have learned how to advocate their ideas, therefore, the exact impact cannot be calculated, as it webs far beyond our visual reach.

We are proud to say, many of the teams who competed in the three rounds have said that they will continue to move forward with their projects, and fight for more environmentally proactive spaces, despite not making it to the final round. Because of these motivated teens, the future of Guerrilla Green looks like a relatable resource for students to understand and incorporate environmental sustainability into their most used spaces. The conversation will be run by students, for students. The easiest way to get a teen to understand that going green is easy, is by showing them that it’s possible.

Want to see a showdown in your community in 2014? Don't be shy, send us a note.

Links:

• Guerrilla Green Website
• Guerrilla Green Facebook