Greenworks: Student Environmental Projects Fund

Greetings all,

I hope the new year has been treating you well.  Our Indonesian students in the Greenworks program are progressing well, with projects proposed for coral replanting and documenting traditional ecologic knowledge on a nearby island.  They are slowly working through their curriculum and improving the design of their projects.  And we'll be there soon as well!  We'll bring a full report from our field expedition when we return.

As a result of the success of Greenworks in Indonesia and growing interest from our other partners, we found it prudent to reorganize our projects here on GlobalGiving.  Moving forward, this fund will become a general fund to support environmental stewardship projects for all our partners, with a special focus on Indonesia, Ukraine, and Brazil and expansion to more countries possible in the future.  This project will be paired with another one of our projects that will help support engineering students who will be building drones, microsatellites, and other tools for students in the environmental program.  Together, we will be using these programs to kickstart the Greenworks Global Classroom, where students from classrooms and clubs around the world will be working to together to propose, design, and implement solutions to the environmental problems that affect their communities.

To help this program launch more widely, we will be having a 200% matching Greenworks fundraiser March 6-19.  Keep an eye out for that ... all donations during this time period will be matched at 200%.

With gratitude,

Lev

Greetings all,

Our Indonesian colleagues have been hard at work this summer.  We are in the process of implementing a canal cleanup and artwork project.  This artistic display will feature wall paintings and solar-powered LED lighting to create a visually spectacular setup that will draw attention to signage that will lead passers-by to interactive educational resources we are developing on waste management, climate change, and marine resource management.  We plan on linking many Greenworks programs into this central hub over the upcoming months.

Speaking of new Greenworks projects, we are in the process of finishing a trial run of a new "mission/project design" curriculum in Brazil.  We'll be revamping it slightly based on success in Brazil and then deploy it with Indonesian (and Ukrainian) students in the upcoming weeks.  This will help our new batch of students to better structure their projects for maximum impact.  The two groups excited to begin work soon will be working on coral transplantation to shore up unhealthy reefs and understanding how traditional knowledge interfaces with managing marine resources (and working to improve it).

Our successes in Indonesia are helping expand this project to Ukraine and Brazil, with support coming from US students.  We'll be working over the next year to establish a Greenworks exchange network that will allow students in all four countries to exchange strategies, ideas, and technologies to tackle some of the most difficult environmental challenges their communities face.  Thanks for your support over the years and we're looking forward to scaling up this project very soon!

With gratitude,

Lev

Greetings all,

The Greenworks program is continuing to grow.  We are currenlty working on revamping the curriculum to better serve a multi-lingual audience with multiple technical capabilities.  We aim to have this work complete by later this year so that we can link our Indonesian students and teachers with similar classrooms in Brazil, Ukraine, and Scotland for the diplomacy games.  To do so, we've been working with two enthusiastic students in California who are helping design the digital infrastructure to help us better offer the curriculum and environmental diplomacy game.

In other news, we've won a small grant from the US Department of State and Global Ties US to further develop the Greenworks program in the direction of the arts as a medium for environmental education.  We'll be funding student groups to clean up and beautify the local drainage canals to help control the outflow of plastic pollution and organic garbage into the ocean.  This endeavor continues to build on the successful Greenworks student projects, incorporating the garbage can project and composting business into a broader endeavor on Ternate to change behaviors and attitudes about garbage and its management.  More updates in a few months!

With gratitude,

Lev

Hello all,

I hope the new year is treating you well.  Our new student cohort has been busy in Ternate with their composting project over the past few months.  In addition to learning about the science of composting via our partners at Khairun University, they have also received training in start-up business managing to help give their composting endeavors long-term sustainability.  Over the past few months, they have worked with local businesses to collect organic waste from farms, artisans, and street vendors, and process it into compost that they have been marketing at the local Ternate and Khairun University expos.  They are currently working to teach their skills to local woman and young entrepreneurs to help tackle the waste problem in Ternate one community at a time.

We are very proud of what this cohort has accomplished and look forward to what our next batch of students will innovate!

With gratitude,

Lev

Greetings all!

As the COVID-19 pandemic has loosened its grip on Indonesia, I'm happy to report that our first cohort of students (from summer 2020) have successfully completed their Greenworks project!  Erlena, Kurniawan, and Azzahra built six upcycled trashcans, color-coded for organic and plastic waste, which were donated to Runny’s School and SMK Pembangunan on their home island of Ternate in eastern Indonesia.  They have been working with the elementary school students to teach them about waste management.  They sent a detailed final report outlining their project, timelines, and accounting for funds spent to successfully complete the program.

We have also reviewed and approved a new project submitted by the successful spring 2021 Greenworks team.  Faniran, Alfitri, and Fahriansyah will continue building upon Erlena's trashcan project by developing a more formal business-and-education project around composting.  The project seeks to expand composting education to two more schools, establish a pipeline of waste-to-compost between the schools and Khairun University, and attempt to start a composting business so that the project can be self-sustaining.  We are looking forward to working with them over the next few months!

As you begin thinking about your end-of-year giving, please keep Science Voices and projects such as this one in mind.  We'll have more information about our Giving Tuesday campaign coming soon.

With gratitude,

Lev