Greenworks USVI: Astrosustainability Incubator

Greetings all,

Our Virgin Islands colleagues have been hard at work building their science club and recruiting students to join.  The task has been challenging due to poor weather and frequent loss of power on the island over the past few months, which has resulted in difficulties with meeting regularly.  Nevertheless, the group has successfully completed their first year of operations.  At the moment, club activities are on hiatus due to the summer vacation holidays, but we will continue workng with our colleagues to plan out the activities and growth of the club in the upcoming school year.

With gratitude,

Lev

Greetings all!

Wishing you a happy new year and thank you for your continuing support of our projects.  We have a number of groups who successfully finished the Greenworks teacher training curriculum late last year, which has made them eligible for funding generously donated by you over the course of 2023.  Those groups (and their associated projects) are:

• Beeworks (Brazil) - This project will focus on native (stingless!) bee education and monitoring, working closely with the Guapiruvu agroforestry community.  Teachers and students will be buying beehives and creating a public education program with the agroforestry community to not only teach about native bees but to begin building sustainable business models that can help feed native bee honey into the co-ops in which the community is already integrated for export of their other food products.  In addition, there will be some electronics projects integrated into the program to help monitor the beehives and their health.  Native bees are important pollinators in tropical environments, but their numbers have been greatly reduced due to destruction of native habitat and native plants on which they depend.  This project will help rebuild their populations, build teaching resources that we can then use with partners in Indonesia, and help build the community's self-sufficiency.

• Greenworks Ternate (Indonesia) - This project will focus on deploying the project design curriculum in a 1-2 week workshop to Khairun University students in March, who will then submit their environmental stewardship projects for review and funding.  We anticipate receiving project proposals in the green economy, potentially building on our previous composting project or articulating with our Brazilian bee projects.  We're looking forward to what the students have in mind!

• Carpathian Geotourism (Ukraine) - This project will work on helping build geotourism opportunities in the Carpathian region of Ukraine.  In addition to building digital teaching resources (which will utilize Agavi as it comes online), additional resources and projects will be developed by students and teachers working with community leaders to monitor and clean up waste in the community, particularly waste that negatively impacts the scenic rivers that run through the area and reflect negatively on communities trying to build geotourism opportunities.

• Incubator (US Virgin Islands) - This project will work on building off a fledging astronomy club that is working to integrate into the local arts and farmers' market communities to build up local skills and opportunities for science communication and integration of astronomy into other facets of the island economy.  We're looking forward to see what the students have in mind for environmentally sustainable and science-focused island tourism opportunities!

As we work to help our partners launch these projects, look for additional fundraising opportunities to help build up funds for these projects to continue in 2025.  This fund, meanwhile, will likely transition back to a US Virgin Islands specific-fund, with the main fundraising for Greenworks Cohort 2 for 2025 taking place in our other GlobalGiving Greenworks project.

With gratitude,

Lev