Greenworks: Student Engineering Projects Fund

Greetings all,

I hope the new year finds you well.  We were recently awarded a grant for our astrotourism projects from the International Astronomical Union's Office of Astronomy for Development.  This will allow us to finish up our astrotourism and museum work in the upcoming months, which will be implemented in the longterm through our partners at the Etelman Observatory in St. Thomas.

Discussions with our colleagues at the Etelman Observatory indicated that they want to continue developing additional programs hosted at the observatory, but ones that are focused more on the local population's educational needs.  We decided that this would be a good fit for our Greenworks program.  Greenworks is an environmental stewardship global classroom program that works with students in Ukraine, Indonesia, and Brazil.  The goal of the program is to help students who want to address an environmental issue (such as climate change or plastic pollution) acquire the necessary skills and tools to design and implement a successful approach.  So far, we have helped students in Indonesia develop upcycled trash cans for better trash management and composting businesses.  New projects in Indonesia are focusing on corals and traditional ecologic knowledge, and our inaugural program in Ukraine has students working on a monitoring program for a local hydroelectric dam.

These environmental stewardship projects need technical support and tools, and developing these tools would provide a great engineering opportunity for teens and young adults in the US Virgin Islands.  As a result, we're going to start building a fund to help support these engineering projects, with expansion possible to partnering clubs and classrooms in California, South Korea, and Ukraine later this year.  In the long term, we are aiming to build the Greenworks Global Classroom where we'll be able to connect youths all over the world in an exchange of knowledge, tools, and culture as they work together to address critical environmental issues.

We hope you'll join us in helping launch this fund with a 200% matching opportunity.  Between March 6-19, all donations to our new Greenworks Engineering Fund will be matched at 200% and support kids in the USVI who will help engineer solutions for the new friends they'll be making around the world.

With gratitude,

Lev