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Climate Change is Elementary

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Profile Information

Hometown:

Celebration, FL

About Me:

I've got a BA from Cornell and a Masters in Public Health Education from Berkeley, and have been a social entrepreneur for 40 years. From 1967-1976 I worked on the highly successful Family Planning programs in South Korea and Taiwan where I helped with planning and implementation along with Korean and Chinese colleagues. I got to help advise on family planning program design in the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Turkey, and Nepal. From 1976 through 2006 I started and ran a nationwide program to help elementary kids with self-esteem and to explore alternative learning styles. That program, Juggling for Success, has taken me to over 2,000 elementary schools in 41 states and several countries to deliver one or two day programs that involve all students, all teachers and almost all parents.

What are you working on?

My new program is called "Climate Change is Elementary." I'm in the school for a day. I start with the teachers first in a 30 minute session in the early morning. Then I take the students one grade level at a time in the gym or cafeteria. Every group has a grade and age appropriate activity they experience that gives them a piece of the climate change puzzle. For instance one grade will become polar bears looking for arctic ice (gym mats) which is constantly melting. Another will be split in two with half the kids playing Oxygen creating trees in the rainforest and the other half portraying Oxygen breathing "critters." They get to experience directly what happens when the woodsman starts cutting down the trees. Another grade gets to be chinstrap penguins swimming from Tierra del Fuego to the Antarctic to search under the ice shelfs (gym mats) for krill ((juggling beanbags). At the end of the day the entire school meets for an all school assembly and everyone gets to see what the other grades have learned. That same evening parents come in and the kids show them what they have been working on. Then the parents and kids together create a Family Sustainability Checklist of all the things they promise to do to reduce their carbon footprint and insure that the planet will stay healthy. The follow up is called "From Seed to Feast."

Each classroom gets a closed social networking website that they can use to communicate with one another. This website helps solve the following problems:

1. Elementary students want to get on line and chat with friends, BUT safety is an issue unless it is a closed site like ours;
2. Schools want to communicate with families via internet, BUT privacy and security are concerns except in a closed network;
3. Schools want to help families take action to reduce carbon footprint, BUT don’t know where to start, so we give them tools;
4. Companies with “green” products and services want to contact motivated customers, BUT don’t know where to find them, so we provide a channel for careful selected green vendors;
5. Social networking is popular BUT revenue models are sketchy so we start with a revenue model that works;
6. Schools want to “go green” BUT have no budget, so we help with a program that gives schools a percentage of family green purchases to help green the school.

This program is under development and will be tested fully in 2008-2009. Nationwide roll-out is going to be in 2009-2010.

Website:

http://www.climatechangeiselementary.com

Favorite Book(s):

Barbara Kingsolver - Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Favorite Musician:

John Lennon and John Denver