A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Solar Home
Designing with a purpose means more than just designing a home - it means designing our world, our community, and other young minds like our own. To us, design is about creating good and reaching out to the most people. In order to reconcile spending nearly $400,000 on a house that needs to be shipped 2,000 miles across the country - a house in which no one will ever live - we knew from our first days as Solar Decathletes that we needed to do something above and beyond the competition requirements. The strength of the Solar Decathlon is its amazing ability to raise awareness, thus community outreach became one of our main focuses.
And when we say outreach, we mean real community outreach: far-reaching, robust and long-lasting outreach. We mean the Sustainability Decathlon, a bright idea in community outreach (and hopefully the first of an annual program). Dreamt up in a coffee shop next to the Santa Clara University Campus, the 2007 Sustainability Decathlon is a competition between local high schools to best "green" their campuses and transform their communities.
The 10 Categories of Sustainability
The Sustainability Decathlon is modeled after the 10 competitions of the Solar Decathlon, and includes 10 categories meant to encompass the many facets of sustainability and involve high school students with diverse interests and talents. High school teams competed in the following areas:
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Community Outreach Energy Understanding Conservation Ethics & Social Responsibility Economics Awareness Event Campus Involvement & Education Website Technology & Innovation Transportation |
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Santa Clara University student volunteers visited high schools once a week for three months, teaching about sustainability, giving project guidance and bringing them in contact with the resources of the SCU Solar Decathlon Team and Santa Clara University. These meetings became a fertile ground for brainstorming and a launch pad for high school student projects. Thanks to a generous $20,000 grant from the Intel Corporation, when students wanted to install a bike rack, or buy waterless urinals and plant trees on their campus, they had access to the funds.
High school teams analyzed campus energy consumption, researched energy efficient fans, hosted carpool-to-school weeks, revitalized abandoned recycling programs, asked their teachers to turn off the lights during sunny class periods, and taught their friends about electric cars, recycling, and solar energy. Most notably, high school teams raised awareness of environmental issues among their peers and developed remarkable outreach programs on sustainability basics to nearby elementary and middle schools.
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The Ripple Effect In Action
By teaching high school students about sustainability, we taught ourselves about community involvement. By teaching elementary school students about the earth and recycling, high school students taught themselves about environmental leadership. By teaching their parents and their teachers, all involved students learned about engaged, action-based education. We call it the ripple effect of education. |