Resources:
Lee Van Roth's Feature Article: Students lead successful effort to reduce waste at annual forum at EMU
Southeast Michigan Stewardship Coalition (SEMIS)
Transcription:
Lee Van Roth: You're listening to 89.1 WEMU. I'm Lee Van Roth, and this is On the Ground Ypsi. More than 300 students, educators, and community members recently gathered at Eastern Michigan University for the annual Southeast Michigan Stewardship Coalition Community Forum, where students from across the region showcase projects addressing local, environmental, and community challenges. This year's event also marked the first time the forum operated as a zero waste event, thanks to a student-led partnership involving the Early College Alliance students, EMU Dining and current EMU students. To tell us more about the event and work of the Southeast Michigan Stewardship Coalition, or SEMIS, is Coalition Director, Anna Balzer. Anna, thanks so much for being here today!
Anna Balzer: Thanks so much for having me!
Lee Van Roth: So, the SEMIS community forum took place on May 21st at the Student Center on EMU's campus. For listeners who weren't able to attend, can you give us an idea of what this year's forum was like and how it went from your perspective?
Anna Balzer: Yeah. So, the Community Forum is sort of the culminating event of the SEMIS coalition every year. So, throughout the year, we're working primarily with teachers who are supporting students to do place-based education projects in their community. Like you teed up, they're really focused on how can they improve their local community, their school campus, using what they learn in school to do it. And a really key part of place-based education is celebrating that and having an authentic audience to really receive what the students have worked on all year, provide real feedback to them, and be able to make connections to other things that are happening in their community that adults and organizations and things are leading. So, the Community Forum is really our main place where we do that. And like you said, we invite students from all across the region to EMU's campus at the Student Center. And it's a day that's really led by students. So, this year's forum included over 40 presentations. So, they're led by students from kindergarten to 12th grade, and they're done conference-style, so students are hosting a room. Sometimes, they're doing a presentation that's 30 minutes long, taking questions from the audience. Sometimes, they are in, what we call, a spark presentation, which means they have just a 10-minute presentation. But then, they get to talk with other groups in the room that are presenting on similar subjects. But the idea is that adults are there to learn from students and, again, to provide that authentic audience to ask them meaningful questions and give them a chance to more deeply explore what they've learned and the community connections within that. So, that's sort of the basis of the Community Forum is having that space for students to share their projects. But if you're going to gather 300 students in one place, you should probably do some more fun stuff too. So, that gets a little bit into like some of the newer things we did this year. We had a part of the celebration that was sort of passing along something we called the "Spirit of SEMIS," that really is a way to embody our principles and for students to carry that out into the community. We had some intergenerational dialog, so really giving students a chance to connect across campuses, across communities, and with adults and reflect on what's the impact of all of this work in aggregate when we're all working together. And then the big one. What we'll probably talk a lot more about is our zero waste initiative and that being the first time that students were at the helm of an action project that took place on the day of the community forum and what they really wanted to do was reduce our food waste.
Lee Van Roth: Let's get into the zero waste aspect of it, just like you mentioned. So, this initiative, like you said, was completely student-led. This came from a student idea and was put together by students in the community that wanted to see this kind of effort being done on campus, or at least being expanded on on campus. So, why is it so important for SEMIS to provide that kind of space for students to grow from these big ideas and create these potentially big changes for their communities?
Anna Balzer: Yeah. So, one of the pieces of place-based education is taking informed civic action. And so, a lot of what happens in a place-based education project or unit is that you're using your local place as inspiration for learning, as sort of like a laboratory for learning. And that's across multiple disciplines: math, science, ELA, Spanish, whatever the teacher is teaching already, using the place as sort of the grounding for how that learning is going to happen. But a really unique part is this idea that at the end of the sort of exploration and learning portion, students are very well equipped to then affect change in their community by taking an action. We usually call that a civic action project. And that can be anything from like a physical project they might do in their school's community or on the school's campus itself, like installing a rain garden or a prairie, starting some sort of initiative at their school, which might be a recycling program, a composting program at their own school, or doing some sort of like public advocacy or public awareness, so communicating what they've learned. And those pieces are really important because the learning will stick with young people through place-based education. But beyond the sort of academic learning, we really want young people to walk away with this sense of self-efficacy and this sense of agency that, as young people, and again starting as young as kindergarten, they have the ability to make change in their community right now, and they can learn what they've used in schools, they can use the relationships that they developed with adults in their communities to take leadership on issues that are important to them and really make a difference. And so, that's important for all of the projects that are happening across the schools in Southeast Michigan throughout the year. But it's also important at the Community Forum, and that was actually something we heard directly from young people. So, leading up to the Community Forum, we visited a couple students' classrooms and we asked them, "What do you want to see at this community forum this year? What would make it a meaningful event for you?" And across several classrooms we heard, "We really want to do an action project together this day and really be able to see when we all come together, what's the sort of impact we can have." And that's what they did with this food waste initiative, this zero waste initiative, was really being able to say, "This is our event. This is something we care about. And we really can make a difference," even in the span of a couple hours when we're together for the forum.
Lee Van Roth: This is WEMU's On The Ground Ypsi. I'm Lee Van Roth talking with SEMIS coalition director, Anna Balzer. So, Anna, for students or educators who either are hearing about the Community Forum for the first time, or maybe the idea of it has kind of floated around in their school before, and they want to be a part of it come next year, what does that process look like?
Anna Balzer: Yeah! I think the best place to start would be reaching out to the SEMIS coalition. So, again, we're supporting these students and teachers and school communities throughout the year. So, ideally, we'd love to connect with teachers or students early on in the school year, even in the summer. We have some events for teachers that happen over the summer to be able to help them plan out what's going to be your place-based education project or unit and how is it going to impact your community, and then really help them get prepared for the Community Forum. So, you can look us up online. We're a part of the EMU community. So, if you're here on campus, you can find us over at Boone Hall, but you can also email us at team@semiscoalition.org. But that's the best place to get started. We do, however, always welcome students, teachers, community members to just come to the community forums. So, if your not going to present, maybe it's your first time hearing about it, or you just want to see what the event is, we welcome you to just come and see what it looks like and see the experience really feels like. And so, we usually announce the date early in the fall, so you can put it on your calendar for next year.
Lee Van Roth: And as you and the team at SEMIS is looking forward to next year's event, are there any goals or ideas that you're looking to build on or explore with next year's event? Are there maybe ideas or plans you've heard from students and educators already that you maybe thinking of implementing? I know next year maybe is a little bit far off, but I wonder if there's any sneak peek to next year's Community Forum that you can give us.
Anna Balzer: Yeah. Well, I think one thing we're not going to be able to let go of is this zero waste initiative. It was a big hit! There were over 415 pounds of waste that were diverted from the landfill just in one day.
Lee Van Roth: Oh wow!
Anna Balzer: So, a combination of about 250 pounds of the food was composted and then 165 were recovered and sent to Hope Clinic. So, I think that kind of momentum is starting to take on a life of its own. Even outside of the Community Forum, we heard from the principal at Early College Alliance that they do events on campus as well because they're based right here on campus. And so, they're going to start doing zero waste events with everything that they host here, now that they know that it's possible and especially because their students are really the experts in how to run a zero waste event. So, I can imagine you'll see that again next year. But in terms of looking forward, we're always trying to find ways to make this event more youth-led, more youth-centered, and more of a celebration of the impact that young people are having in their community right now. And so, we'll be listening to our young people, over the next year, the projects that they're leading in their campuses and in their communities, what elements of that they want to bring to the community forum. And then, we also have our group from Salina Intermediate in Dearborn, who is stewarding the Spirit of SEMIS this year and are really excited to kind of have them as thought partners in how can we do a better job using the Community Forum as a way to steward the great work that's done as a coalition across our whole region.
Lee Van Roth: Well, Anna, I want to thank you so much for joining me here today and for sharing more about the work being done over at SEMIS throughout the year, not just at the Community Forum, as you mentioned. You know, it's really exciting to see students given this opportunity to turn their classroom learning into these real world actions and causing this really great impact in their community.
Anna Balzer: Thanks so much!
Lee Van Roth: For more information on today's topic and links to the full article, visit our website at WEMU.org. On the Ground Ypsi is brought to you in partnership with Concentrate Media. I'm Lee Van Roth, and this is your community NPR station, 89.1 WEMU, Ypsilanti.
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