Read: En’Owkin: What it Means to a Sustainable Community by Jeanette Armstrong
- Consider the 4 different perspectives described in the essay. Which perspective do you think you represent? (remember that “youth” doesn’t refer to actual age but more to a set of attitudes)
- I believe that I represent the individual and family category of this essay. My family has always done small business internally to then branch and contribute to the community around us. With this you have the individual contributions you bring to your family then to your community. I use my own individual skills to then contribute to my community.
Write a paragraph or two on each of the following questions:
- Which of the Permaculture values did your service hours address and in what way? (EarthCare, PeopleCare, FairShare, LimitsAware) : Earth care and people care, earth care with taking care of animals, then bringing coffee grounds to a bio digestor, then the people care for the helping pothers and painting bowls.
- Describe how your service hours followed the Principles of Civic Engagement. Give specific examples of your activities in relation to at least 5 different CE principles.
- Principle #3: Meaningful Learning Opportunities: Helping students paint the empty bowls, Taking time to teach them each individual step. They already had the bisque bowls but they wante to know how to do it. I explained, then showed them which paints to use and what to use after on top of the paints. They also asked about the kilns so I explained that as well
- Principle #5: Reciprocity: The weeding of the Cornelius elementary, taking care of the garden so their garden can produce and expand
- Principle #7: Academic Integration: Learning about how you can be engaged in the community and in pacific through meaningful clubs and organizations: boxer foodshare, boxer gardens. Boxer food share was actually something I learned about through my coworker at Starbucks. At our location we tend to have food and baristas that get donated or thrown away. So there’s two of us that take bags full of food and put it in the boxer food share fridge. Boxer gardens is also a great place to go to learn about sustainable food sources. I wish I had time to go more.
- Principle #2: Public Interest: While collecting coffee grounds, I spoke to the other baristas about it and it gained interest on their part. I got a few of the Portland Starbucks to consider collecting their grounds for the public again. They had stopped doing it cause they didn’t have anyone asking, but when I came in as a Partner (Starbucks employee) they realized there was still interest. Two of the locations wrote it down for their managers to go over and see if they could potential start this again.
- Principle #4: Depth of Experience: Milking a goat was probably one of the coolest experiences I’ve ever had. The experience I received from that will stick in my brain forever. It was really cool to do and now I know how to do it as well.
- Describe how your service hours followed the Principles of Sustainable Design. Give specific examples of your activities in relation to at least 3 different SD principles.
- Mollison 1: Obtaining a yield, while working on the farm after taking care of the animals you could pick vegetables. Taking pumpkins, tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, lettuce. It’s a sustainable source of food and it lasted my family a while
- Morrow: The focus on long term sustainability – Boxer food share, Boxer gardens, The greenhouse, the Cornelius elementary school
- Hemenway: Turning problems into solutions – the coffee ground waste at my starbucks locations and 4 others. It always gets everywhere, it’s heavy to carry, it goes to waste. Instead collecting it and using it for gardening or a bio digestor.
- Describe how your service hours benefited you personally in terms of skills you learned or practiced that will be useful to you in life. (such as essential employability skills or any of the learning outcomes associated with this class)
- My service hours benefited my personal skills because I tend to be a quiet reserved person, I don’t go out of my bubble very much. I like to be independent but with these service hours it made me branch out into our community even just a little bit. I had opportunities to get involved and make a change, even though I barely had time this course I think I’ll continue to try and contribute to these organizations.