Climate Challenge Is Coming to Classrooms!

The best part of my job as C3’s Residential Program Manager is the ability to interact with the wider community - whether it’s Power Parties hosted by Home Energy Challenge participants, presentations at churches and civic organizations, or potlucks in my own home. I’ve learned a lot about our local community’s questions, concerns, and barriers to climate action from interactions with homeowners and renters - and I hope they’ve learned a little from me! 

Through my outreach work, I, along with many others, have identified a very inspiring group of leaders in our community - the students of Charlottesville and Albemarle County. Our kids are showing up for the climate in a big way. From Greta Thunberg in Sweden to Gudrun Campbell and Gabby Wade (and probably your kids too!) locally. They are organizing and participating in strikes, encouraging their parents to participate in the Home Challenge, and asking their school administrators to participate in our Better Business Challenge. 

We’re hoping to meet the needs of young people in our community with the Classroom Climate Challenge. This program is designed to take the best parts of our adult-oriented programs and create a meaningful experience that works for students. So I focused on 3 major themes in creating this Challenge:

Action

Like the Home Energy Challenge, the Classroom Climate Challenge is oriented towards climate action. Specifically, the actions in the Classroom Challenge are designed so that students can feel agency and responsibility for their work. Translating the overwhelming problem of climate change into measurable, quantifiable concepts around climate action allows students to identify a direct connection to their own lives and understand that they are already equipped with solutions to combat climate change. 

Audience

The Classroom Climate Challenge embraces the idea of partnership. The guidebook contains multiple resources for engaging with local non-profits (including C3!) and other classrooms  and schools. We want to showcase the hard work of our local students and find an outlet for them to visualize their collective agency.

Opportunity

The Classroom Challenge should provide an  equitable opportunity to engage students in climate conversations, regardless of classroom resources or household engagement. All students will be affected by climate change and need tools for climate action.

It wouldn’t have been possible to develop this program without input from the students themselves. So I took the show on the road and visited several local elementary and middle schools to chat about climate action. They had a lot of advice and ideas to share, more than one blog can cover, but these were the highlights from my school visits:

• Kids want an audience. They want to talk about climate change together and with adults. When I watch students give presentations, I can see a visible relaxing of their posture and breathing as they talk. The simple act of naming and sharing a concern about climate is a meaningful experience for all of us.

• Kids are creative. The Classroom Challenge guidebook is full of resources for teachers to plan activities, discussions, and projects around climate action. But kids are pretty good at identifying solutions on their own to reduce their carbon footprint. This is why an online platform will be so important for kids to share their creative expressions with each other.

• Kids are motivated. So many of these kids understand barriers to successful climate action - and they are ready to remove those barriers single handedly. I talked with students that are creating campaigns to put solar panels on all of our schools. One classroom was determined to collect and sort recycling for any Albemarle County resident that needed it. 

The students of Charlottesville and Albemarle County are ready to change the world and C3 is so excited to provide a little support for their work! 

Stay tuned in the weeks ahead as we currently are working on bringing our Classroom Climate Challenge directly to your home as a resource for learning online while schools are out. We hope to release this as early as next week.