This is the third article of a series looking at how college age young people live Sustainability and how this experience transforms their life.
In this series, we first looked at how the Drexel University Environmental Sustainability Community experiment came about. We then consider how the experience transformed the life of the leader/facilitator and the life of some of the group original members.
This post is about Kate the tall Science Undergrad Student who took her friends dumpster diving. The fourth post is about Megan, the low-key and efficient organizer and finally Ben, the unexpected environmentalist tells the story of his experience in the ESC.
Kate K. is a tall vivacious young woman who showed up to all our interviews on her bicycle. She is in her third year of a Science program at Drexel University. This is how Kate viewed her experience a year after participating in Drexel University Sustainability Learning Community:
Between weekend trips and many vegan dinners, we bonded over our beliefs in Environmental stewardship. Although our approaches were different, our goals were the same.
Living with people with a similar level of care for the Environment made me learn of new ways to care for the Earth. The members of our Sustainability Learning Community opened my mind to different ways of thinking about Sustainability. I believed that environmental problems were an issue that people as individuals have to contend with, because I am the only person that can ever change my own behavior. However, others in the group took steps to make work places, living situations, schools more environmentally friendly. I think that we took Environmentalism down to a personal level with each other and with other people; and that we also took Environmentalism upwards to the level of the organization or of the institution through our actions during the 2008 Earth Week. In that respect, I became more of a social activist.
Being in such a group helped me to learn to take more responsibility for my own actions. Believe it or not, I used to be more “flaky”. Living and sharing the same area with a group of people I would run into on a daily basis made me feel guilty when I did not show up for meetings. I started to stand by my words and live more by my convictions. These people became family to me in my college life. They were the first group of people I met during my Freshman year in school and two years later we are still in close contact with each other
