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Profiles of Prescott College Students and Graduates Doing Sustainable Work
Profiles of Prescott College Students and Graduates Doing Sustainable Work
By Terril Shorb
One of the joys of this website for me is to be able to share with the world the projects of some of my students and graduates. This is a new site and I am actively engaged right now in collecting stories about Prescott College ADP sustainable community students who living self-experiments in ways to live a more sustainable life.
I'll share here some very brief descriptions of the kinds of things some of my students are doing and as we grow the site in coming weeks, I'll ask those students themselves to share more details about their good works.
It is my pleasure to share with you some glimpses into the kind of work that students are doing in the Sustainable Community Development (SCD) program within the Adult Degree Program at Prescott College. As we continue to grow this website, students themselves will be offering profiles of their work in their own words. Meanwhile, I present some word snapshots that will give you the flavor of the good work that is underway.
A student in Massachusetts has initiated a series of dinners in his neighborhood. This offers local residents some opportunities to get to know each other, to exchange views on topics of concern for the neighborhood, and to begin think of each other as affiliated by virtue of the place where they have chosen to live. A different call to social interaction occurs in northern New Mexico where one of the SCD graduates uses her continuing permaculture practices as an invitation to her rural neighbors to learn, with her, how to conserve water through gray-water and catchment systems, how to grow gardens in the difficult high-altitude climate and then preserve excess harvest, and how to interact with, and become stewards of, wild creatures and plants who reside in the local natural environment.
A SCD student who works with a local community supported agriculture project in northern California has invited parents and their children, who attend local elementary schools, to participate in small-scale farming projects where basic food production skills are taught in a way that they can be transferred to residents' homes. The groups become socially affiliated and there is talk of creating neighborhood garden projects.
A focus on a locally endangered species, the prairie pronghorn (antelope), has served as the genesis of another student's project in a central Arizona city to coalesce local residents who love the creature into a citizen group that is bonded in the dedication to preserving local wildlife as part of the quality of life of all who live in the community.
On the rolling prairie lands of eastern North Dakota, a student is working with men who have serious health issues, including diabetes, to create a small tribal group devoted to restoring traditional Lakota activities, including growing of herbal medicines.
Another SCD student, who lives in communities on both sides of the U.S.—Mexico border—is working with a micro-lending project and local businesses to create public places such as a plaza on the U.S. side, which he enjoys in Agua Prieta in Sonora, Mexico. The plaza is the social heart of the Mexican community, he says, and he sees a real hunger for just such a common meeting place in the American community where he spends a significant portion of his daily life.
One of my students who currently lives in Prescott, Arizona is working with one of his local mentors to create an organization of local builders who are pledged to principles of green building. To better assure that the practices are indeed more in harmony with local nature and with helpful social structures, each prospective member responds to a series of questions meant to help the builder to truly know what practices serve “green” building and which ones do not. So the student has woven sustainable principles right into the membership process—and thus an important learning process for those who wish to do the right thing.
While I continue to gather more true stories, please enjoy some more profiles of students from our undergraduate and graduate programs that appeared in Sustainable Ways, the newsletter of the Sustainable Community Development program at Prescott College's Adult Degree Program edited by Terril Shorb and Yvette Schnoeker-Shorb.