Do or say something to convince one or more people to take an action relating to sustainability sometime in the next week. Make sure it's an action they can (and do) complete before the week is out, and that you have some way to measure the impact of. Feel free to be creative.
Example Ideas: Convince three people to convince others (start a chain letter); Create a petition instead of creating behavior change); target it at an institution of some sort; Do something on Facebook (e.g. start a group). See if it spreads; Create a "global" initiative (or locally) such as "turn off the dvi" or "turn off the lights"; Organize a flash mob; Hold a rally; Stake out a politician
You may not tell them that this is a class assignment or in any way bring the class into it.
Examples of projects from past year's class (note the focus was individual action): (1) Cold Water Initiative (2) Proud to be Secondhand (3) Reduce use of automatic doors
AS A GROUP you must
- By 1/28 prepare to present your assignment to the class for 5 minutes and answer questions for 10 minutes during the critique. Tell us:
- What did you do? Which person or people were you targeting?
- Be sure to specify the expected impact of the action. Be specific about units (e.g. %age of U.S. residential energy use, lbs CO2, etc), number of people needed to achieve this savings (e.g. 10% of the U.S. population) and frequency the action would need to take place (e.g. 1 per household, weekly, etc).
- What did your measurements show?
- Did you use technology? If so how? If not, reflect on positives and negatives of using it.
- Anything else you think is really important
- By 1/28 (latest, midnight) Post to the ETS class Accomplishments "blog" with a brief writeup including at least one image of what you did.
- Learning goal: Explore the difficulties inherent in really changing what someone does; moving outside of the "ivory tower"
EACH PERSON in your group should write up a 1 page, single spaced (11 pt font) essay on the following topic:
- The assignment focused on individuals. Think beyond the individual approach and suggest ways to bring about large scale change or action for the same basic goal.
- Learning goal: Show us that you are able to think outside the box of individual behavior change
EACH PERSON in your group should write up a 1 paragraph, single spaced (11 pt font) commentary on your group work.
- Why do you think it worked or did not work? What would you do differently the next time?
- Rate each person you worked with by name based on how much they contributed (more than others (+), less than others (-), or about the same as others (=)).
- Learning goal: An average rating will be reported back to each person privately after the first 4 assignments are done and will affect your grade if it is consistently less than others (-)