Eliminating Barriers for Youth in Sustainability with EcoRise
I had the pleasure of collaborating with EcoRise and a group of multi-disciplinary designers to develop Rise Club, a student-driven high school organization aimed at providing students with the tools, resources, and support necessary to create meaningful careers centered on sustainability.
EcoRise
Roles:
Service Designer, Researcher & Strategist
Service & Product Proposal, Speculative Design Artifacts
Sustainability
Christine Huynh, Scia Verma, Arooj Sheikh, Chinmayee Kulkarni, Alice Tian
Challenge
EcoRise, an Austin-based non-profit organization, provides school-related programs for young people to address real-world sustainability challenges. Their educational content encompasses sustainability, design innovation, and social entrepreneurship. They have created these programs to engage high school students in the field of sustainability, while also aiming to offer assistance and resources to both college students and recent high school graduates who wish to pursue a career in this area. Initially, we began with a broad problem statement, “How might we support EcoRise students in their transition to college and careers in sustainability and green building?”
Results
The result of this project was a proposal and project guide for EcoRise to develop programming and pathways for young students to enter the field of sustainability called the Rise Club. This proposal included branding, merchandise, growth plans, educational sustainability curriculum and programming, and a website to host resources for high school students participating in Rise Club.
What is Rise Club?
The core aspects of Rise Club revolve around the following pillars:
Forming Community Providing time to socialize, so members have quality time with peers and mentors to create long-lasting relationships. Creating memorable, collaborative, and challenging projects brings students a sense of accomplishment when they finish them.Having swag that can help the club establish traditions and create physical, visible bonds between members.
Exploring Sustainability Bringing in guest speakers from college and industry to show students how to integrate sustainability into their current plans.Host skill-building workshops with EcoRise to examine different facets of sustainability and the relevant job opportunities.Going on field trips and volunteering opportunities to experience the interdisciplinary nature of sustainability firsthand
Building Futures Providing mentorship through dedicated advisors who can give students the inspiration, clarity, and guidance to succeed in their future paths.Equipping students with tangible tools and resources can help students plan their futures through high school and beyond.Developing activities, experiences, and exercises to build hard and soft skills needed to establish successful careers.
The Design Process
1. Empathy: We started by familiarizing ourselves with the people we were designing for through interviews, secondary research, and a lot of absorption of new perspectives.
2. Synthesis: We then took all that we learned and pulled the most critical findings out to form insights that guided the rest of our process.
3. Defining the Problem: After identifying insights, we further highlighted our users’ exact problems and where we might design to improve their experience. We created a new problem statement, “How might we create resources that allow students to channel their passions into an actionable path towards their dreams?”
4. Ideation: We then moved to brainstorm and develop a range of solutions and ideas that could potentially work and benefit our users.
5. Prototyping: Then, we put our ideas and assumptions to the test as we returned to our users with a prototyped experience to see what about our solution worked well and where it needed a tweak, change, or pivot.
“How might we create resources that allow students to channel their passions into an actionable path towards their dreams?”
“The best thing [EcoRise] asked me was what can I help you with?... I loved the panels, mentors, and accountability structure.”
Rise Club Student Hub
One of the resources we created for students to get started is a shared hub, powered by the Notion Platform, called the Rise Club Student Hub. This hub contains resources to aid students by creating a club, running a club, Community Building & Advocacy, and many workshops and Daily Activities. There is also a section that gives mentors, teachers, or sponsors resources to guide young Risers as they go through their time in the Rise Club.
Conclusion and Recommendations for EcoRise
Rise Club is an idea built around the lives of high school students. Meeting students where they are at such a critical time in our climate crisis is of vital importance to the continued prosperity of our society. Rise Club's success starts with EcoRise. As a national organization, we hope to see the Rise Club build a name recognized in the same way the National Honor Society or Key Club is. But at its core, we hope the pillars of community, sustainability, and future building remain strong and are only amplified as Rise Club grows.