By Jessica Carver 

In the heart of Mill Valley, California, a school community was buzzing with excitement, and the air was filled with cheers of triumph. This was a day to celebrate, as Strawberry Point Elementary School accomplished something extraordinary—they became the very first school to earn Platinum Certification in the Zero Waste Marin Schools Program. “This means we’ve been incredible at sorting our trash!” a student leader announced to her community during the all-school assembly. “Let’s keep it going!” ​

By Austen Needleman

On a typically sunny San Diego afternoon, I met Dawn Wirts, a 9th grade physics teacher at High Tech High International, to drop off her air quality monitoring classroom kit. She offered me a campus tour and excitedly showed me around the school’s bright entryway, greeting almost every student along the way. During this first visit, the hallways were empty of the environmental murals and activism art that would soon fill them as a result of Dawn’s students’ participation in Energize Schools' annual People and Planet Challenge and Air Quality Program.

By Austen Needleman

By Matilda Peck

By Alaitz Aritza

By now, many of us have experienced the impacts of climate change like wildfires, floods, drought, heat waves, storms, and more. These experiences make it vital to talk to young people about climate change, but can also make it more challenging, as the topic is linked to traumatic experiences and anxiety.

Here are a few tips to talk about climate change with young people in a trauma-informed way, whether you are an educator, parent or anyone else.

Do talk about it! Discussing climate change is hard. We want to protect children from scary topics, and we may feel ill-equipped to have difficult conversations. But climate (mis)information is everywhere, leaving children with the impression that it is too late for action or that their future will be bleak. 

Youth need trusted adults to share information in an age-appropriate way, and talking about trauma is an important way to address it. You can start by allowing young people to share what they know, ask questions, and express their feelings.
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By Hannah Maryanski Kiszla

By Fernando Gil

Following the 2020 Energy Challenge, our team at SEI’s Energize Schools program was looking for new ways to get students excited about participating in our Earth Day Challenge. We wanted to find an engaging and entertaining way to educate students about environmental issues and their possible solutions. To me, the obvious choice was a video game. 
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Creating a video game hadn’t been feasible for SEI in the past, but my background in coding and engineering provided the missing pieces to make it a reality. My concept was simple, a 2D platformer (like Super Mario) with levels for different topics we wanted to cover for Earth Day. Named “Duckie’s Adventures: Earth Day,” students play as a duck who uses their knowledge of sustainability to tackle several environmental issues.