Most folks know that Boxerwood promotes environmental learning and action with school children. But we also have strategies for doing the same with local college students and this year those opportunities are flourishing.
Young people away from home need job experience and career mentoring, personal growth and meaning, and community connection. Boxerwood creates those opportunities, especially through our partnerships with Washington and Lee University (WLU). Here’s a quick sampler:
Work study & interns: Lucky for us, three undergrads earn federal funds while working for Boxerwood each year. Grace, an art major, creates many of our beautiful signs; Gabby, a bio major, and Amanda, a psych major, provide program prep and research. Each year another 2-3 interns earn college credit as part of specific environmental studies coursework. Most recently, Belen researched compost topics for our Backyard Compost Challenge, and both Maya and Conor helped calculate the carbon footprint of WLU’s 24 sports teams.
Course integration: This semester Boxerwood forged formal agreements with two WLU courses that embrace community-based learning (CBL). Students in Prof. Leah Green’s environmental literature class made a series of Boxerwood visits, applying course texts and understandings to the Boxerwood landscape, with goal of generating and sharing reflective activities for future garden visitors. Students in Prof. Nandini Bhalla’s journalism course, meanwhile, completed media audits, drafted press releases, and other material for Boxerwood’s COREworks initiative. At the same time, these students also increased their connection to climate change and action: our Boxerwood goal and educational outcome.
Extracurriculars: Our still emerging carbon offset marketplace, COREworks, is already engaging many students in its development. The WLU law clinic helped us with some tricky legal work, in the process increasing knowledge of solar permitting among budding lawyers. The college’s student-led consulting service tackled a related marketing analysis. This latter partnership generated an insightful report that will help guide our COREworks campus outreach. Equally important, it introduced sustainability issues into the thinking of the undergraduate research team and sparked new conversations with more than twenty hellenic organizations. Were the students of law and commerce honing their professional skills? Absolutely, but so much more.
Working at the college level benefits students, the university, and Boxerwood. We look forward to deepening the work in semesters to come.
