Climate Adaptation, Community & Environmental Education, Consumption & Waste, Education & Awareness, Energy, Food, Habitat & Wildlife, Outdoor Education & Leadership, Transportation, Water

Earth Day in Santa Barbara is a huge event because of the historical origins of the event being deeply rooted in the area. The goal of coordinating the annual Earth Day event foster a dialogue between students and different environmental organizations whom I had invited to the event. The list of participants included Get Oil Out, Santa Barbara Resource Recovery and Waste Management, Santa Barbara MTD, Santa Barbara Water Conservation, Sierra Club, Climate reality project, Santa Barbara Environmental Defense Center, SBBike centro, Sea Center Natural Art Museum, and SB channel keeper. A couple of school clubs were invited as well to set up their tables and engage with students such as the bio club and geology club. Student engagement was very high due to the incentive systems we had put in place. In the center of the event, we had stations such as tee-shirts, house plants, fair trade snacks, etc that the students could redeem if they collected enough tickets by talking to enough environmental organizations. 

 

 

721 cliff drive
Santa Barbara, CA 93108
United States

Since this was a couple of years ago now it has been hard to retrieve all the documentation and even remember all the little details regarding the event. I think this brings attention more to my lack of record-keeping at the time than anything else but what I do remember is that the ticket system coupled with prizes worked the best to engage students with the organizations. I had multiple organizations tell me this was the best earth day they had so far as student engagement goes. Incentive structures are key to getting something done. I learned this throughout my year stint as the sustainability commissioner and in this event specifically. The project was designed to address student education or more so lack thereof regarding sustainability issues. At the time I did not set up a way to measure my success or failure which I know now is critical in any project management job.