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by Sara Laimon

Barack Obama – a transitional agent of change – has become our country’s first African American U.S. president, and more and more young people are following his lead in trying to make America a more responsible and respected place.  In my own section of the United States, Los Angeles, California, I have founded the Green Ambassadors, an organization of students who work tirelessly to teach their communities how to practice sustainable living.

Africa is where my story, as well as the stories of our ancestors, begins. All human DNA can be traced back to a small village in the middle of Africa, according to preeminent anthropologist, Richard Leakey.  And in this “cradle of civilization” is where I began my advocacy for sustainable living in order to honor our ancestors by keeping our Earth and its species alive.

When I was 20 years old, I traveled from Wisconsin to Zimbabwe to build and manage a dairy farm.  There, I was hit with an ominous epiphany - if the rest of the world modeled the U.S. in the way it consumed natural resources, eventually we’d no longer have a planet.  After all, the United States has only five percent of the world’s population, but uses more than 25 percent of the Earth’s natural resources. 

I left Africa and knew my next mission was to teach people the consequences of our wasteful practices and how our actions affect our planet. I received my Biology and Secondary Education degree from Alverno College and became a Nationally Board Certified teacher at Environmental Charter High School.

Teaching biology was wonderful, but I had a gnawing feeling that I had to do more.  To create real change, I needed to build something larger than myself . . . something larger than the sum of its parts.  I needed to educate young people about sustainability so they could incorporate this knowledge into their own lives once they left school and entered adulthood.  And with this knowledge comes a great responsibility to teach others about this new paradigm shift called green living.  That’s why I began the Green Ambassadors program.  I hope that this program will help re-create education, schools, communities as we know it!

The Green Ambassadors

Green Ambassadors is a project of the Environmental Charter High School in Lawndale, California. It is an education program that empowers youth to be agents of change in their communities and the world. Through service learning, community partnerships, and cross-cultural global exchanges, the program fosters personal growth and leadership skills to help youth tackle the most critical environmental issues facing our planet. The Green Ambassadors program focuses on four essentials of environmental education:  Experiential Learning, Connections, Eco-literacy and  Community Organizing.

Experiential learning enables students to leave behind the trappings of competitive learning and allows them to satisfy their curiosities and follow their passions with an instructor’s guidance.  Students’ are encouraged to seek respite from the harried outside world to nourish their inner selves and see how all actions have consequences and those consequences directly impact the planet. Understanding interconnections allows students to be critical thinkers and while doing positive things for people and the planet.

Eco-literacy means understanding the fundamental concepts of ecology and sustainability.  In other words, how one community’s wasteful living hurts every section of our planet. Green Ambassadors are involved in their communities. There is a true sense of community among students, parents and teachers.  As competition is eliminated, caring, kindness and friendship grow.  Students carry this sense of community to places outside their school, teaching sustainability with enthusiasm and compassion.

The Green Ambassadors program is part curriculum, part organization, and part global outreach service.  Its students are trained in such green solutions as:  composting, water conservation, food, energy, and lifestyle.  The youths are then charged with creating an event that educates, inspires and motivates members of their communities to become part of the green solution.

To accomplish this, we instruct students in filmmaking, creating and delivering presentations, understanding marketing, and developing an event planning organization.  They are responsible for fundraising before and during these events to ensure that they raise enough money so another school or community may adopt green lifestyles.  

Such solutions are spread to people of all ages, races and income levels.  They involve numerous partners with other community organizations, government agencies, and nonprofit groups.

To coordinate these events, students work in small groups to complete an important set of tasks. These groups are another way students see how they’re interconnected - if they fail to finish their project, the event will not occur, the community will not be trained, and they will not have an improved relationship with their environment. 

The Green Ambassadors’ dedication to training communities about sustainable living actually improves their own learning while enhancing their innate curiosities.

Student Jordan Howard is an excellent example.  Her parents enrolled her in the Environmental Charter High School against her wishes. “I thought the school was for hippies,” she said wryly, “my GPA was pretty low.”  Everything changed when she was introduced to the Green Ambassadors and extended her learning beyond the classroom walls. Suddenly she felt inspired to travel to conferences, local schools, and other events, teaching and sharing green solutions. 

“At first, Jordan, came home telling us that we can make a difference, stop using your plastic bags, start recycling, put our organic matter back into the soil, grow your own food.  We were resistant at first, but then we started to get it.  We saw that her life was changed, so we changed along with her.”  Green Ambassador Parents.

During this transformation, Jordan’s GPA rose, along with her confidence, giving her an even better sense of accomplishment. She now hopes to go back to her church to educate her congregation about the importance of sustainable living. 

Aldo Leopold, a preeminent ecologist, forester, and environmentalist in the early 20th century urged us to connect with our natural world. In fact, he said that one of humanity’s biggest mistakes is getting food from a grocery store and heat from a stove. As a result, most kids are unaware of the natural cycles of our planet, including the origins of our food and energy. 

This is why composting is a foundation of the Green Ambassadors’ environmental education. By creating their own soil, students see first-hand the connection between their actions and the rest of the natural world – only then are they ready to expand to other ecological horizons. 

These horizons extend to other communities, cultures and even countries. In our first global exchange, students traveled to Brazil to study the world’s largest freshwater ecosystem called the Patanal. The following year, even more Green Ambassadors went to Costa Rica to study its sustainable permaculture systems and to determine what can be done in terms of design, in their own homes, schools, and communities.

In our competitive, materialistic society members of the Green Ambassadors learn a crucial element to sustainability - the difference between want and need.  Cendy, an 11th grader and event coordinator for the organization remembers when shopping was the main focus of her life.  Her epiphany came when she observed several Costa Rican boys having a wonderful time playing ball with a hard fruit.  If they could have such fun with nature, then surely her paradigm of  fun without so many clothes and gadgets is possible.

This empowerment does not end with the student.  The students go home and inspire their families to make a difference. I often get reports from parents, “Jordan comes home telling us that if we make just small changes, we can heal the planet.  So now we recycle and are starting to compost. Who knows what great endeavors we’ll  achieve next.”  And that’s how change happens, one step, one person, one community at a time. 

Who knows, perhaps all of my students won’t have to move Zimbabwe to build and manage their own sustainable farm, but they can do it in their own homes in their own communities to serve as models for the rest of the world.

Sara Laimon is founder of the Green Ambassadors program at the Environmental Charter High School.

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