Sustainability Workshop

Concise Summary: Help us pitch this solution! Provide an explanation within 3-4 short sentences. The goal of the Sustainability Workshop is to show that schools can unleash the creative and intellectual potential of young people to solve the world’s toughest problems. How? Most schools teach academic content to prepare students for a distant future, when they might eventually work on the great challenges facing society. We take those challenges as our starting point, and use school to help students find ways to surmount them. Launched in September 2011, the Workshop provides 29 high school seniors the opportunity to spend the entire year working in close collaboration with public, private, and educational partners to develop technologies, policies, and strategies to improve energy efficiency in buildings. Growing the economy while saving the planet: how’s that for a senior project? Example: Walk us through a specific example(s) of how this solution makes a difference; include its primary activities. Beginning in September 2011, the Sustainability Workshop will allow 30 high school students to spend their entire senior year at the Philadelphia Navy Yard’s clean energy campus, working on cutting edge projects focused on improving the energy efficiency of building design, construction, and renovation. The Workshop is being launched with three major partners: the Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster (GPIC), a $122 million U.S. Department of Energy initiative to create a research and development, business incubation, policy, education and workforce development hub for energy-efficient design and building at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.; the School District of Philadelphia, which will award students course credit for their work; and Drexel University, which will collaborate with the Workshop on its “Eco-House” project and allow student to enroll in courses on campus. The Workshop curriculum will be divided into two phases. The first phase will introduce students to the fundamentals of clean energy by having teams of students work to increase the energy efficiency of a room within the school, and then within their own homes. The teams will consult with various GPIC partners and Drexel faculty about strategies for maximizing energy efficiency. The second phase will focus on planning and designing the Drexel University Eco-House project. During this phase, students will form small teams focusing on specific GPIC innovations. In keeping with the broad scope of the GPIC’s work, an innovation could be a specific technology, a process, a policy, or some combination of the three.