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We're investing in school communities.
Who We Are
Who We Are
We are students, educators, researchers and teacher education specialists. Our passion is working with our international peers and their communities to develop and scale Education for Sustainable Development.
We believe that success will hinge on three key cultural traits. Each trait can be learned and developed in ways unique to each community:
An on-going scientific inquiry into human behavior and cultural evolution.
The development of (individual + institutional) flexibility to move toward one’s values and better care for one’s self and others in the face of adversity.
A culture of community science defined by measurable improvement.
Together we hope to advance timely answers to the questions "How do we improve our schools to work for all?" and "How do we improve our communities to work for all?" that are applicable to diverse improvement efforts everywhere.
Our People
Our People
Alex Herwix, PhD, Evolving Schools Project (Germany)
Alison Malisa, Evolving Schools Project (United States)
Diana Singh, Evoling Schools Project (Poland)
Julian Wong, Evolving Schools Project (United States)
Liz Rosario, Evolving Schools Project (United States)
Nadia Sandi, Evolving Schools Project (Belgium)
Peter Bullock, Executive Director, Director of Consulting and Training Services (United States)
Susan Hanisch, PhD, Co-founder, Research Director, and NetLogo Principal Trainer (Germany)
Josia Razafindramamana, PhD, President of the Board (Madagascar)
Dustin Eirdosh, PhD, Director, Cofounder and President Emeritus (Germany)
Brian Lowe, PhD, Secretary of the Board (United States)
Prof. Bjorn Grinde, Director (Norway)
(Click link above to view, copy and print):
Articles of Incorporation
IRS Determination Letter
Bylaws
IRS Filings
At a glance, we are proud of our:
All volunteer, independent board
Executive Director serving as non-voting officer
Commitment to transparency
Big Red Earth d.b.a. Global ESD is a U.S. educational nonprofit incorporated in Elkins Park, PA. Our application for retroactive 501(c)3 reinstatement has been approved by the IRS.
Our EIN is 47-5484033.
Our Lead Partner
Our Lead Partner
Global ESD formed as the precursor to OpenEvo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Today, OpenEvo serves as our lead academic partner on educational design and research, centrally coordinating free guides, curricula and other resources to develop Educational Design Labs and Community Science Labs and more, on a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-SA).
Global ESD formed as the precursor to OpenEvo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Today, OpenEvo serves as our lead academic partner on educational design and research, centrally coordinating free guides, curricula and other resources to develop Educational Design Labs and Community Science Labs and more, on a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-SA).
OpenEvo helps learners and community stakeholders better care for themselves, others and the planet by:
Understanding problems through human behavioral sciences
Evolving solutions within a framework of participatory community science and networked improvement
Our History
Our History
In 2016 Global ESD formed as a U.S. 501(3) nonprofit in Pennsylvania. It is currently incorporated under the name Big Red Earth, a nod to its initial focus in Madagascar under cofounders Dustin Eirdosh and Susan Hanisch.
In 2017, in association with the University of Leipzig (Germany), Dustin and Susi began developing an international teacher training module under the name Global ESD. These activities have continued under their leadership with additional support from the Max Planck Institute, leading to the formation of OpenEvo.
Beginning in 2019, teachers and students in Leipzig, Germany and internationally, including Lake Placid High School (NY), have piloted elements of the Global ESD design concept. Working with these pilot sites identified the following barriers:
Teachers request and need direct implementation support.
Schools do not have budgets to provide or sustain direct implementation support.
Communities and schools do not share a conceptual framework in community science.
In March 2020, Evolving Schools was initiated as a peer to peer networked improvement community to alleviate barrier #1.
During the COVID pandemic from May 2020 - May 2023, we were largely inactive, with the migration of our free resources to OpenEvo underway for stewardship in perpetuity.
In 2024 we began to re-organize around a mission to help schools and communities implement these free resources, something that OpenEvo is not chartered to do.
In 2024, Portraits of the Park was initiated in the six million acre Adirondack Park of upstate New York (USA) to address barrier #3.
Today, OpenEvo will continue to centrally coordinate all curricular resources and design concepts developed to date, while Global ESD works to partner with schools and communities to implement OpenEvo resources, to address barriers #1 and #2.
In the near future Big Red Earth will adopt Global ESD as the formal legal name of the organization.
Our Logo
Our Logo
The Global ESD logo represents a phylogenetic network graph including the impact of lateral and oblique transmission of heritable information. We use it as an icon of perspectives in cultural evolution science that integrate human genetic evolution with the more complex flow of cultural information through social learning networks.
The Global ESD logo represents a phylogenetic network graph including the impact of lateral and oblique transmission of heritable information. We use it as an icon of perspectives in cultural evolution science that integrate human genetic evolution with the more complex flow of cultural information through social learning networks.
For a deeper explanation, please see highlights from the work of Johann-Mattis et al (2013) below.
For a deeper explanation, please see highlights from the work of Johann-Mattis et al (2013) below.
Johann-Mattis List, Shijulal Nelson-Sathi, Hans Geisler, William Martin. 2013. Networks of lexical borrowing and lateral gene transfer in language and genome evolution. Bioessays 36: 141-150 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/bies.201300096
"In [the above] diagram, the tree explicitly represents the phylogenetic history of the languages while the evolutionary network represents possible borrowings of words, with thicker lines representing more borrowed words. Clearly, the network also contains phylogenetic information of some sort. For example, the connection of the root of the Romance languages to English reflects the conquest of Britain by the French-speaking Normans, which modified the Old-German heritage of Old English. However, the diagram as a whole is a hybrid, rather than being a coherent phylogenetic network in the simplest sense (ie. a reticulation network).
To see this clearly, note that the phylogenetic tree is not fully resolved and that the evolutionary network does suggest possible resolutions for several of polychotomies, such as the relationship of Armenian and Greek, the relationship of Albanian to the Romance languages, and the relationship of the Gaelic languages to the Romance languages. So, in some cases the evolutionary network helps resolve the phylogenetic tree rather than forming a reticulating network.
It would be possible to derive a phylogenetic network from this minimal lateral network, but as it stands it is a combination of a phylogenetic tree and a so-called evolutionary network. "
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