This month, I’ll be representing ACE at the Green Schools National Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Its goal is to engage high school students and drive them towards making their schools more sustainable.

There is a lineup of some pretty exciting-sounding speakers, including Phillipe Cousteau, the  renowned environmental activist who is the voice and face of a lot of environmental educatioin programs delivered online.

One of the programs – the National Youth Summit – focuses as an idea exchange for the youth interested in greening their local schools together and I think that the Green Schools National Conference Leadership Program interests me because I value efforts like this to spur greener schools.

This generation’s youth, through our action or inaction, will have a great impact on  social, political, economic, and environmental issues.

It is vital to instill the importance of sustainability and the value of protecting the environment in the youth, who will keep those values and hopefully continue to act on them throughout their lives.

I hope to learn what schools from varying backgrounds can do to help green themselves and the surrounding environments as there is no one-size-fits-all approach to making local institutions more sustainable. By learning the various approaches other students are taking towards sustainable schools and bringing the knowledge I’ve acquired from working with ACE and my own project, I hope to learn about the various paths to sustainability, and help fellow students in their endeavors.

More to come after my trip north and east!

-Adarsha