School of Sustainability Graduate Culminating Experiences
Student capstone and applied projects from ASU's School of Sustainability.
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- All Subjects: Leukemia & Lymphoma Society of America
- All Subjects: community engagement
- All Subjects: Economic
Description
The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS) is a nonprofit organization with a mission to fund research for cures and treatments for blood-related cancer. Light The Night is one of the largest peer-to-peer (P2P) fundraising events, with approximately 1 million participants in 140 locations throughout the United States and Canada. Participants walk with illuminated lanterns to commemorate survivors, friends, family, and supporters. Sustainability has become a recent concern for the organization's corporate partners and participants. LLS has shown an increased dedication to sustainability by creating an Environmental Social Governance (ESG) council and has started taking steps toward creating a national plan for sustainability at its Light The Night events.
In order to extend sustainability efforts to all Light The Night events, the client requests
the Sustainable Light Knights team to:
1. Perform a materiality assessment for the Light The Night event, accounting for the recent changes that seek to minimize sustainability practices.
2. Rank the event's most material activities, considering food and beverage, waste, lanterns, and t-shirts.
3. Assess the best practices for managing the highest material impacts.
4. Identify short, medium, and long-term goals to help LLS plan for the next steps.
The Sustainable Light Knights consist of four Arizona State University graduate students from the Masters of Sustainability Solutions program. The team undertook an analytical approach to understand P2P events, including conducting a landscape analysis, identifying best practices, and completing a TOWS (threats, opportunities, weaknesses, and strengths) analysis. This served as the foundation for the materiality assessment for Light The Night, which guided what impact topics were most relevant.
To bring the findings of the materiality matrix to life, The Sustainable Light Knights created a sustainable event planning checklist, procurement guidelines, and a vendor pledge for use by Light The Night staff. We grouped the recommendations for sustainable actions into low, medium, and high priority and short, medium, and long-term goals. While this assessment focused on Light The Night, the recommendations outlined in this action plan can extend to other fundraising events organized by LLS. The design of the action plan is to help LLS leadership and staff take steps to lower the impact of Light The Night events nationwide and transform LLS into a leader within sustainable events that can serve as an example for other nonprofit organizations to follow.
ContributorsGreathouse, Madelynne (Author) / Guerrero, Morgan Leon (Author) / Rodriguez, Rebeca (Author) / Skoric, Kirby (Author)
Created2023-04-26
ContributorsGreathouse, Madelynne (Author) / Guerrero, Morgan Leon (Author) / Rodriguez, Rebeca (Author) / Skoric, Kirby (Author)
Created2023-04-26
ContributorsGreathouse, Madelynne (Author) / Guerrero, Morgan Leon (Author) / Rodriguez, Rebeca (Author) / Skoric, Kirby (Author)
Created2023-04-26
ContributorsGreathouse, Madelynne (Author) / Guerrero, Morgan Leon (Author) / Rodriguez, Rebeca (Author) / Skoric, Kirby (Author)
Created2023-04-26
ContributorsGreathouse, Madelynne (Author) / Guerrero, Morgan Leon (Author) / Rodriguez, Rebeca (Author) / Skoric, Kirby (Author)
Created2023-04-26
Description
The community of Gumantar in Lombok, Indonesia, one of the poorest regions of the island, is home to a large number of coffee farmers. Due primarily to production quality, these farmers struggle to earn a sufficient wage. While trying to provide for their families, the local environment often suffers. The persistent poverty has resulted in lower education levels, health care barriers, and decreased well-being. In an effort to empower the farmers and promote sustainable development, I have created a best practice guide that looks at five coffee production factors. The local farmers have specifically requested case supported, science-based information regarding these factors. The factors include farming techniques, drying practices, coffee specific small business skills, financial literacy, and coffee certification requirements. Access to information regarding these topics is intended to help reduce poverty, increase accessibility to quality education, and support local economic development, environmental health, and community health and well-being.
ContributorsPrice, Paige (Writer of accompanying material)
Created2020-05-13
Description
This project focuses on building capacity for the long-term viability of the garden based learning program at Martin Luther King Early Childhood Center through cultivating relationships with local organizations and businesses. Building upon Matthew Waldman’s 2018 MSUS project work with this school and The Farm at South Mountain, this project’s purpose was to explore ways to integrate the greater school community and allow them to share their vision for an outdoor community space.
The intervention tool used to engineer this collaborative mindset was individual square foot garden boxes that each child in the 2019 student body was able to decorate and take home.
As a tangible piece of this Culminating Experience, I have installed a pollinator garden that has been registered with Monarch Waystation Program. This space serves as a celebration of the school’s mascot and provides a totem for the collective action of the community.
With the onset of COVID-19 and the implementation of local, state and federal guidelines, the school has been closed since March and has curtailed the anticipated deliverables.
The intervention tool used to engineer this collaborative mindset was individual square foot garden boxes that each child in the 2019 student body was able to decorate and take home.
As a tangible piece of this Culminating Experience, I have installed a pollinator garden that has been registered with Monarch Waystation Program. This space serves as a celebration of the school’s mascot and provides a totem for the collective action of the community.
With the onset of COVID-19 and the implementation of local, state and federal guidelines, the school has been closed since March and has curtailed the anticipated deliverables.
ContributorsSchmitt, Christina (Writer of accompanying material)
Created2020-05-13
Description
COVID-19 brought so much uncertainty into the world and has molded this project into what it is today. The first project journey that was chosen was meant to show the impact of how much plastic waste was being produced at Starbucks. Then due to COVID-19 yet again, it changed into how much paper waste there was within the State of Washington Department of Licensing (DOL) Business and Professions Division (BPD). DOL BPD is a state agency division that licenses over forty plus professional and business licenses to the residents of Washington state. Due to the pandemic, the project transformed into how the three pillars of sustainability impacts remote work within BPD. BPD is in this new and unique paradigm where the deliverable that was brought forth as this project completed are, “The 9 Benefits of Sustainability through Remote Work” (Appendix D) where this specifically showed DOL why remote work is sustainable and how it should be implemented even further throughout the agency. This list was put together with the benefits that best fit DOL BPD.
ContributorsReynolds, Jordan (Writer of accompanying material)
Created2021-02-11