Help BUGS middle school students expand the composting, waste reduction, and food growing projects that contribute to healthy and sustainable communities.
Leader
Susan Bakst
Location
500 19th Street Brooklyn, NY 11215
BUGS is launching a “Healthy Soil Builds Strong Communities” campaign on our celebration of Earth Day on April 29 that will continue through fall 2022. This multidimensional campaign will educate BUGS students, families, schools in our building, and neighbors about the connections between what we grow, eat, and recycle and the impact of food waste on the health of our communities and climate.
Activities will include expanding our classroom compost programs and zero-waste commitments to initiatives such as:
April-June
Summer
Fall
Our goal with the “Healthy Soil Builds Strong Communities” campaign is to provide students with the opportunity to apply their sustainability learning to solving climate, health, and social justice issues. We also want students and families to see the connections between what we grow, eat, and recycle through initiatives that provide deeper and meaningful learning about composting and sustainable ecosystems. We are striving to increase our school’s engagement in the community, by connecting our school gardens to those community volunteers who can both contribute to it, and benefit from it as a food source.
Through this initiative we expect to divert an estimated 400 pounds of food scraps from going into landfills and use our school compost systems to transform it into nutrient rich soil for our gardens and street trees. We anticipate our composting-reduce waste campaign to reach more than 1,000 students, teachers, and families in the educational campus we share with another middle school and pre-K program plus hundreds more residents of Sunset Park and Windsor Terrace through grassroots campaigns and community service projects. We also hope to serve as a model for other schools in our district about how to reduce waste to protect our environment, enrich our communities, and inspire even more sustainability changemakers.
BUGS offers diverse middle school students from across Brooklyn a hands-on interdisciplinary education with a focus on real-world problem-solving and exploration of environmental, social, and economic sustainability. Our innovative approach empowers students to take community action that brings their learning to life and grows them as critical thinkers, doers, and agents of change towards a more just and sustainable future. We also believe that our students will be able to use this funding opportunity to educate and motivate the community about actionable steps they can take to protect our environment and contribute to healthier and more sustainable communities.