ELP Fellows Current Activity Fund Projects

ELP Activity Fund grants provide resources for fellows to put their leadership training into practice in their communities and areas of expertise.

The ELP Activity Fund offers small grants (averaging $5,000) to ELP fellows each year to pursue leadership-building activities through individual and collaboarative projects. Fellows apply to the Activity Fund once during their two-year fellowship, and complete their projects within one or two years.

The most recent Activity Fund projects, funded in 2006 & 2007, are listed below. Previous years' projects can be viewed by visiting the Activity Fund Archives

Activity Fund grants awarded in 2007

An Audio Guide to Urban Birds: Sharing Students' Success, Expanding Opportunities for Learning
Regan Brooks, 2006 Greater Boston Regional Network Fellow
In the fall and winter of 2006-2007 ten high school students from Codman Academy Charter Public School participated in the production of an audio guide to urban birds. Through Activity Fund support this student-created teaching tool will be offered as a resource to other schools, students, and educational programs. Sharing this guide free of charge will help expand opportunities for students to engage in more informed analyses of the ecological health of their neighborhoods while also offering an example of successful, student-generated service learning.

Connecting from Within: A One-Year ELP Community Exploration Linking Food & Environment
Melissa Bailey and Saulo Araújo, 2006 Greater Boston Regional Network Fellows
Laila Goldberg, 2006 Delaware Valley Regional Network Fellow
The ELP Food Affinity Group ("Foodies") was created to stimulate the debate within the ELP Community about the complex linkages between food and environment issues. This project "Connecting from Within" is an effort to both grow the membership of ELP Foodies and to educate the broader ELP network about the role of food, food systems, and agriculture in our collective environment and social justice work. By providing forums for discussion such as the "ELP Café", a Politics of Food issue forum and a "Farm-to-Plate" tour series, the Connecting from Within project will generate a healthy and fertile debate within ELP about food and environment that we can each then share outside of ELP with members of our individual communities.

ELP Jr. Network*
Saulo Araújo, Dawn Chávez, T.J. Hellmann, Elke Hodson, Kristen Wyman, 2006 Greater Boston Regional Network Fellows
In creating a network of young environmental leaders from existing organizations in the Greater Boston region we seek to join the programs and initiatives that exist in Boston together through common goals and resource sharing for greater leverage and results. Participating youth will receive formalized training by mentors and outside facilitators in network building, leadership development, and communication strategies. The youth will also be exposed to careers in science and the environment through university partnerships. The network will utilize social technology as a means to increase the ability for and frequency of conversations among youth that pertain to environmental issues in the Greater Boston region.

Activity Fund grants awarded in 2006

SPLENDOR (Spiritual Life, Ethics and Nature, Deepening our Reverence) - An Introduction to Religious Environmentalism for Houses of Worship
Fletcher Harper, Class of 2005
SPLENDOR will be a high-quality educational introduction to religious-environmentalism for diverse religious communities. With Activity Fund support, I will work with two experienced religious education curriculum designers, an internationally-respected designer and evaluator of environmental education programs, a graphic designer, and a religiously and ethnically diverse Advisory Board to complete professional-level SPLENDOR curricula and facilitator's guides for adults and teens. I will field-test these curricula in four New Jersey houses of worship from diverse ethnic and religious communities and secure feedback from participants at each site and from ELP Fellows from the Delaware Valley Regional Network and the National Fellowship Program. The curriculum, which will emphasize themes of Spirit, Justice and Stewardship in relation to the earth, will be available for use through GreenFaith's website. I will also initiate contact with at least one religious publishing house to explore their interest in SPLENDOR. Full Project Description

Transforming LVMH's Terrazas Winery (in Mendoza, Argentina) into a Model of Ecological Sustainability
Andrea Chang, Class of 2005
I will work with Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH) to transform its Terrazas Winery, located in Mendoza, Argentina, into an international benchmark for sustainability. By building and implementing a coherent strategy melding business and environmental principles, Terrazas will be able to position itself as an international ecodestination. Such a positioning will both contribute to the winery's financial bottom line, as well as enable it to encourage other wineries in Argentina and around the world to integrate sustainability into their business practices. Full Project Description

Casa Kit Designs - Ultra Green Smart and Small Home Designs
Sonya Newenhouse, Class of 2005
This activity fund will be used to develop three home designs to build prototypes for a new company Casa Kit Homes. Casa Kit Homes will provide healthy green living solutions for people that want to simplify their life and live gently on the earth. The ultra green fashionable kit homes will maximize resource efficiency, be powered predominantly by renewable energy, include an edible landscape plan, an energy and water conservation plan, a transportation plan, and a furniture and household ware plan. The Casa Kit homeowner will not only live in a unique green house, but they will become members of a Casa Kit community of pioneers of green living, sharing information and resources amongst each other. To price the homes fairly and provide ultra green features, the Casa Kits will be designed within a footprint of 600 and 850 square feet (and a two unit 1200 hybrid house option). A holistic design process is necessary to design small and smart to afford the alternative green options such as paint with no volatile organic compounds and solar panels to power the stereo. The activity funds will be used to conduct a highly integrated design process with design professionals, conservation professionals, and potential customers (profiled as first time buyers and empty nesters). This team will create and revise concept design sketches and landscape plans that follow function and furniture needs first. The designs will incorporate building concepts and materials for the upper Midwest market, in the Zone 4 planting region. The activity fund project will deliver three designs and a written evaluation of the design process. Full Project Description

Preliminary design of the Urban Sustainability Research Center (USRC)
JJ Biel-Goebel , Class of 2006
JJ Biel-Goebel requests financial assistance from the Environmental Leadership program to assist the Urban Green Partnership (UGP), the organization he co-founded, with the preliminary design of their Urban Sustainability Research Center. The Urban Green Partnership's Mission:

Create, Communicate and Support the information and tools residents and companies, thriving in an urban setting, will need to save money and the planet.

The city is one of the more sustainable places to live due to its density and minimal need for individual transportation. Cities are also home to 60% of the world's population and pose some of the greatest challenges to sustainability known today. UGP proposes to build the Urban Sustainability Research Center in Philadelphia, the fifth largest US city, to start working on solutions tailored to city residents and businesses. The Urban Sustainability Research Center will demonstrate affordable green technology and products and become a focal point for local green businesses, services, organizations and development. It will also be the first research center wholly dedicated to sustainable product research as well as an educational tool for local schools and universities. The data collected at such a facility would not only impact the local Philadelphia region but also the regions surrounding Washington DC, New York, Boston, and Baltimore. If UGP can help half of the 1.5 million residents in Philadelphia reduce their energy usage by 3% we would save the local economy almost $12 million dollars.

JJ and UGP are asking ELP and its network, to partner with us on a project we believe will have an important impact on Philadelphia, and serve as a model for other cities. This project has the support of Temple University, Philadelphia University, the Delaware Valley Green Building Council and many others. Full Project Description

Youth Environmental Health Corps
Takkeem Morgan , Class of 2006
At-risk inner city youth are surrounded by many problems and many opportunities to become a part of the problems. Drugs are everywhere, crime and violence are rampant and simple neglect of the physical environment has become a part of the inner city culture, a lack of structured positive programming along with poor and distant educational institutions leave the youth with nothing except those problems. Environmental and health education with a strong emphasis on community service learning provides an opportunity for inner city youth to actively participate in the resolution of problems that are current, relevant and directly affecting their lives. The Youth Environmental Health Corps is a summer and after-school program which will be an addition to the Philadelphia Green's Youth Environmental Stewardship program, a summer employment program for children between the ages of 14-18 years old. The Environmental Health Corps program will highlight the links and commonalities between environmental health and personal health, providing students with information about environmental problems, tools for resolving those problems, as well as information and models for living healthier lifestyles. The program is an effort to address both the health needs of at-risk inner city youth populations and the inner city environmental movement by providing the youth with education, hard skills, and models of better living. The Environmental Health Corps provides a framework of education, participation and leadership development for youth-directed community problem solving. More importantly, the Corps makes care of the environment and better personal health something that at-risk inner city youth can just say "yes" to. Full Project Description

Developing a Marine Awareness Exhibit
Toni Parras, Class of 2006
The peoples of Asia and the Pacific Islands are inextricably linked to the sea, depending on it for their food and livelihood. In addition, many Pacific and Asian islanders have a deep spiritual connection to the sea that goes beyond physical and economic survival. Modern times have led to a loss of habitat and resource health, as well as their traditional connection to the sea. This project seeks to develop a public marine awareness exhibit showcasing the work of the Locally-Managed Marine Area (LMMA) Network, an organization that assists communities in the Asia-Pacific region in taking charge of managing their marine resources. The exhibit will illustrate the very specific situation of these coastal peoples, their dependence on the sea, the issues that modern times has wrought, and their efforts to protect their resources by blending traditional management practices with modern science. The key focus here is the fact that the local people are guiding and carrying out the work, rather than scientists, government or NGOs leading the way. The exhibit will show exactly what they are doing to protect their resources, how they are doing it, and how the audience can influence marine conservation in their everyday choices. On another note, the exhibit will hopefully give people an improved appreciation of very diverse cultures, traditions, and ways of life. Full Project Description