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By Emily Mallen  Seven in 10 youth report being worried about climate change, and they are looking for the skills on how to respond, says a recent survey from the Institute for Sustainability & Social Justice at Sacred Heart University.
One way to leave youth empowered? Give them the education and tools they need to actively make a difference in their communities. As such, SEI is excited to announce the launch of the new 2025 Energizing San Diego Challenge! This challenge, which will run in the fall and spring, is an exciting opportunity for middle and high school students in San Diego to inspire sustainable change while learning about energy use and environmental leadership.
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 Corey Robinson, SEI Project Coordinator supports with Dr. MLK Jr. Academy’s National Bike to School Day event. Giveaways and raffle prizes were available for any student that walked or rolled to school. The end of this 2023-2024 school year was an exciting milestone for SEI’s education team: a successful first year of the Youth Leading Active Communities (YLAC). Working with four elementary and middle schools in Marin County, our pilot program utilized a student leadership model, empowering students to identify opportunities for active and sustainable transportation in their communities.
Strawberry Point Elementary School's Remarkable Journey to Platinum Zero Waste Certification11/27/2023  Student Green Team members were awarded with Zero Waste Stewardship certificates. 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!”
 High Tech High students created environmental art installations on campus. 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.
 Students in Summit Shasta's Environment Club conducted a waste audit. Spearheaded by their co-leaders, Timothy Lee and Trinity Ly, Summit Shasta‘s Environment Club conducted a four-day waste-sorting audit (seeing what waste could have been recycled or composted rather than thrown into the trash) to educate the school community on the importance of recycling and composting. Their resulting campaign was announced a winner of the of SEI's Earth Day Challenge.
 Graphic from Sam Huang's sustainability campaign When I met Sam Huang, a senior at Rosemead High School in Rosemead, CA, their passion for encouraging climate action shone through immediately. Though just a few days from graduation, Sam was thinking about how to support their garden club with summer volunteer work before heading off to college to study education. Sam and I spoke soon after they were announced as the Southern California winner of Energize Schools' Earth Day Challenge for their social media campaign urging their school community to improve their local and global environments through small changes to their daily habits.
By Matilda Peck
By Emily Mallen  In SEI’s Climate Corps Education Outside Program (CCEO), we plant the seeds of science and ecoliteracy to grow environmental leaders in two big ways — with the students we teach and with the cohort of 31 early-career, environmental educators we place in outdoor classrooms on school campuses in the San Francisco Bay Area. To support our educators as they enter the field of environmental education, we provide a rigorous training and professional development program. This semester, our educators have already participated in 88 hours of training! As we prepare them for their work in schools, we offer instruction on a wide range of topics from lesson planning, equitable teaching practices and best practices in the outdoor classroom, veggie gardening, community engagement, and more.
Join us as we take a look at some of the highlights from this semester of the CCEO training program! By Beatrix Berry  Students at Marin School of Environmental Leadership are taking their environmental knowledge and passion outside of the classroom and into the community. Throughout the summer several MarinSEL students partnered with Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL) to engage the youth community through a Youth Action Team, and they are continuing their work into this school year.
In the past few months, twelve students representing five schools joined the CCL Youth Action Team. Organized by MarinSEL student Harita Kalvai, this team met regularly at Panera Bread every other Saturday morning throughout the summer. During this time, students worked with CCL on a documentary spotlighting underrepresented communities in the face of the climate crisis. They had the opportunity to work with several filmmakers throughout California and are continuing to develop the script for the film. In the coming months, they will interview people in Paradise, California who were devastatingly impacted by the Camp Fire in 2018. By Tyler Valdes & TTriss Williams Renard  For over 10 years, the School of Environmental Leadership (SEL), a program of SEI, has built strong, innovative leaders who are empowered to creatively and critically analyze issues and formulate plans of action. In the spring of 2020, as growing research has demonstrated the extensive health benefits that result from exposure to outdoor environments, Marin County Parks announced the continuance of its community grant program called “Breathe/Respira!” which seeks to provide the means to help the local community have access to parks. The title symbolizes the ability of outdoor recreation and connection with nature to reduce stress and improve health with the Spanish translation of “breathe”, respira, included to underscore the importance of making parks available to all Marin communities regardless of language or cultural background. Upholding strong values of equity and inclusion, SEL was successfully awarded a grant to support equitable access to parks for underserved communities - a project that would be spearheaded by SEL students.
Under the guidance of SEI staff and the Marin Environmental Forum, 10th grade students in SEI’s flagship SEL - Marin School of Environmental Leadership (MarinSEL) - coordinated a year-long Leadership and Environmental Action Development (LEAD) project that brought students at Laurel Dell Elementary School to local green spaces. LEAD projects, a key component of SEL, are equity-forward, community-based environmental action projects that focus on policy change. While the original project design culminated in a field day for K-8 students and their families in Marin County parks, the challenge of COVID-19 restrictions called for solutions driven by creativity, a 21st century skill fostered through SEL. |
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