Category: Green Grant

#GreenGraduates: Featuring Yvonne Cuaresma

The Green Graduate series is a collective of interviews and conversations with environmentally-minded and eco-conscious NYU graduates. As these students move on to the workforce, graduate programs, and other opportunities, we are struck with how different the world seems today than it did a few months ago. Our hope with this series is to inspire, motivate and most importantly, honor our recent graduates.

In the mood for tips on greening the mind, body, and spirit? Look to Yvonne Cuaresma. As a Master’s student in Steinhart’s Food Studies department, Yvonne’s eco-consciousness is a driving force behind her daily choices.

Identifying as Filipina American, Yvonne has many rich childhood memories spent in the natural world. At seven years old, Yvonne’s family packed their bags to move to California, where her days were filled with adventures like camping, fishing, and trips to the lake or beach. While her love for these scenic landscapes grew, her parents made sure that love for the outdoors was coupled with something else. 

Read more

Green Grant Update: The V,OID

by Sophie Jones

Screenshot of zine
Screenshot from The V,OID’s first zine, “FACILITATE DON’T DOMINATE,” a guide to community facilitation.

The V,OID (Volunteers, Organized in Disorder) is a group of volunteers working to emphasize community-based responses to the climate crisis and to democratize environmental education. The V,OID is creating educational materials including a website, a podcast, accessible recommended literature, a zine series, a calendar of relevant events, and a forum for online communication. We believe that sustainable living is a natural product of tight knit, educated, and empowered communities. We are building an example of this from the ground up. We believe this model of a climate group is different and necessary in that it is an example of ecological thriving in the Anthropocene.  Read more

Green Grant Update: Environmental Justice Curriculum

by Kiersten Blake and Alexia Leclercq

Alexia and KierstenNew York City, our shared city, has a gap in environmental education programming, namely a lack of focus on environmental justice education. We decided to co-author and implement an environmental and climate justice curriculum at the High School for Teaching and the Professions (HSTP) in the Bronx. Our project-based curriculum covers topics such as environmental and climate justice, sustainable and equitable land use, public and climate health, and global effects, and was created with teacher, student, expert, and community-based organizational input to reflect on the multidimensional nature of the climate crisis from an interdisciplinary and social justice viewpoint.

Read more

Green Grant Update: Air Quality Monitoring

by Caspar Lant

This past summer, I flew to NYU’s Shanghai campus for two weeks. This was the culmination of a nearly two-year long project to develop a prototype of a low-cost air quality monitoring network. Ironically, the project both culminated and originated at NYU Shanghai. A few years back, I did a study abroad there. I was in the Cafeteria and started chatting with a fellow student about some circuit diagrams I had seen over her shoulder. She told me they were for an independent study class she was taking with a visiting professor (Kevin Cromar, now my advisor on the Green Grant project). As she explained it, the diagram was an existing design for an air quality monitor, which over the course of the semester she would be building from the ground-up with the rest of the class. I rushed to the professor’s office to ask if I could take the course as well.  Luckily, even though it was a week after the enrollment deadline, he obliged! Read more

Green Grant Update: Sustainability in Tisch Film Productions

Sustainability in Tisch Film Productions was focused on discovering and creating a guide for Tisch Film students to use to make their film sets sustainable. As the Executive Producer of Mary and the Mob, an Advanced Television Pilot that was filmed in the Fall of 2018, it was my goal along with Bradley Sachs, the Sustainability Supervisor and Vanneeda Keowmang, the Sustainability Producer, to create a fully sustainable set. The end objective was to not only create our own sustainable set, but to create a documentary and guide that provided students with an easy-to-follow outline on how to make their own sets sustainable. Before encountering this project, we found that there was no guide for a set of our scale as larger scale sets in the industry are slowly implementing the practices themselves.  Read more