“Our goal is to be a one stop place for design conscious products that are sustainable and made with least negative impact on the ecology.”

Rema Sivaram

Rema Sivaram – Co-Founder of Ethic Attic by Fairkonnect

India- 2021 WE Empower Finalist, Asia-Pacific

Ethic Attic by Fairkonnect is a Fair Trade organization based in India that brings local artisan goods to the global market. Working with independent weavers, craftsmen and artisans, Ethic Attic assists them through providing design intervention, product development, market readiness as well as giving the market platform space to sell their goods. Their recent social initiative, Project Hennu, trains women from the slums of urban Bangalore in basic sewing skills, pattern making and production management; initially, Project Hennu was started to help create masks for the Covid-19 pandemic, but has now grown into a full-scale business for exporting quality garments around the world.

Continue Reading

ASU Project Cities has been awarded the President’s Medal for Social Embeddedness, a university-wide initiative to recognize the work of ASU faculty, staff, and programs for their work in social embeddedness. As part of ASU’s charter and design aspirations, social embeddedness encompasses the university’s commitment to serving its surrounding communities by sharing its resources and knowledge networks through mutually beneficial community partnerships.

Continue Reading

“Our vision is to eradicate household air pollution in Africa by empowering local women business owners to fight energy poverty.”

Charlot Magayi

Charlot Magayi – Founder of Mukuru Clean Stoves – Kenya – 2021 WE Empower Finalist, Sub-Saharan Africa

Mukuru Clean Stoves replace traditional stoves with improved cookstoves that reduce exposure to hazardous air pollutants (HAPs), have lower fuel consumption and reduce overall cooking time. While there is a tremendous need in Kenya for these kinds of cookstoves, barriers such as affordability and accessibility prevent further adoption of improved cooking methods. Founder, Charlot Magayi, is passionate about reducing these barriers and empowering women through her improved cookstoves.

Continue Reading

“The vision of our organization is to transform Arab youth into social innovators and changemakers in their communities. To do so, we have developed academic programs that integrate well within international and national curricula and that rest on three pillars: technology, entrepreneurship, and the social good.”

Mona Itani

Mona Itani – CEO & Founder of Shabab Lab – Lebanon

2021 WE Empower Finalist, Middle East and North Africa

Transforming Arab youth into changemakers in their community is the foundation of Mona Itani’s online platform Shabab Lab. The e-learning programs provided online are self-paced and project-based in which students get hands-on experience with new technologies where they learn how to utilize them to create solutions to an issue within their community. Not only does the Shabab Lab platform teach entrepreneurship and technology skills, but it teaches a variety of other important skills such as teamwork, analytical thinking and effective communication.

Continue Reading

TeLisa Daughtry- CEO & Founder of Fly Technista- United States of America

2021 WE Empower Finalist, Europe and North America

“We are on a mission to empower 1 million women and girls by 2026 to become confident creators, innovators and leaders in technology.”

TeLisa Daughtry

With over 1.4 million tech-related jobs available and only 3% of these roles filled by women, Fly Technista, a revolutionary mobile app, bridges the access gap for women within the tech industry by providing education, employment and entrepreneurship resources. Fly Technista is committed to creating inclusive work environments where everyone has access to the resources and develops the skills to succeed.

Continue Reading

2022 WE Empower Awardee, Sub-Saharan Africa

Healthcare has become a critical focus in recent years, especially in Nigeria. Access to simple checkups and medicine is infeasible for millions of Nigerians due to low availability, high costs, and long travel. Yetunde Ayo Oyalowo is a doctor with a dream of universal healthcare throughout Africa, and that dream comes closer to reality every day through her social enterprise Market Doctors.

Continue Reading

ASU's SPRI was heavily involved in both the research and writing for the UN Environment Programme's 2022 Global Review on Sustainable Public Procurement.  The team made up of, Nicole Darnall, Justin M. Stritch, Yifan Chen, Angela Fox, and Jake Swanson contributed to the executive summary, Part I, and Part II of the report.  This report looks at sustainable procurement globally and can be downloaded and read in full here.

The Center for Biodiversity Outcomes is seeking driven, sustainability-minded students interested in becoming an Administrative and Communications Intern on our team. you will enhance transferable skills such as administrative organization, workflow, teamwork and strategic communication. You will be exposed to a variety of fields such as administration, copywriting and editing, social media, public relations and project management to advance biodiversity conservation efforts in the academic and environmental fields. Students may also request specific projects within their area of interest.

This position will average 10-15 hours of work per week. The start and end dates are flexible, according to the student’s availability. Students may work remotely or in our office space in LSA 351 on ASU’s Tempe campus. This internship is unpaid, but it may be eligible for academic credit.

To apply, candidates should email their CV/resume and unofficial transcripts to biodiversity@asu.edu. We are currently accepting applications on a rolling basis. For more details, the full job description can be viewed here.

In this series, we’re sitting down with the Swette Center affiliated faculty to catch up on food systems, innovation, and what makes a good meal. See the rest of the series on our Food Systems Profiles page.

Read on for an interview with Paul Coseo, Senior Global Futures Scientist at Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory and Assistant Professor in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.

Continue Reading

“I am committed to advocating on behalf of refugees and displaced people, especially women, as well as the need for sustainable livelihoods through marketable skills of the future.” --Aline Sara

Aline Sara – CEO & Co-Founder of NaTakallam- United States of America

2021 WE Empower Awardee, Europe and North America

Bridging communities and advocating for refugees and displaced people is at the heart of NaTakallam, an online platform that provides language services such as tutoring, translation and virtual interpretation services. What makes this platform unique is that the services are provided by refugees and their host communities, producing stable economic income and long-term skills. This transformative platform revolutionizes language services and works to change some perceptions of refugees being a burden on society to being an essential asset.

Continue Reading

“We promote the consumption of super-fruits and natural ingredients in national and international markets, creating a clear link between consumer choice and sustainable use of biodiversity from tropical markets.” -- Catalina Alvarez

Catalina Alvarez – Co-Founder of Selva Nevada – Colombia

2021 WE Empower Finalist, Latin America, and Caribbean

Catalina Alvarez has worked for over fourteen years on various projects that seek to improve the economic conditions of small rural producers in Colombia. Alvarez helped to found Selva Nevada which brings the rich biodiversity of Colombia to the market through producing and commercializing specialist-made icecreams, pulps, and concentrates. Through sustainable practices, Selva Nevada partners with indigenous families who live in Colombian tropical forests to generate non-timber forest products (NTFPs) income, protecting their natural resources and biodiversity while also creating dependable incomes for rural communities.

Continue Reading

The Global Locust Initiative Lab team attended the 2022 Joint Annual Meeting in Vancouver November 12–16th, 2022, along with a great showing of fellow locust and grasshopper researchers, many of whom are students recently brought into the fold of locust research through the Behavioral Plasticity Research Institute (BPRI).

Arizona State University’s Syeda Mehreen Tahir co-organized a member symposium with other BPRI students focused on phenotypic plasticity with nine live talks and five on-demand online presentations. The speakers covered topics from genetics to nutrition, coloration, and wing patterns, all in the context of phenotypic plasticity—the ability genotypes have to express different phenotypes when exposed to different conditions.

Continue Reading

Community engagement is a critical component of ensuring that a community has input and is receiving information from its local government. Cities have used a variety of engagement strategies to gather feedback on its services, as well as inform future planning. As a growing community, the City of Peoria is tasked with facilitating engagement with the community but is often challenged by communicating with “hard-to-reach” community members, often those underrepresented in their communities. 

In fall 2021 and spring 2022, Peoria’s Office of Communications partnered with three classes to design strategies for bettering its community engagement processes. 

The original student content is available on the Project Cities website. Read the full summary report here.  

Continue Reading

SCN Info of Interest–November 11, 2022

November's SCN Info of Interest was sent out via email. Includes info on: ASU at COP27, SCN workgroup meetings, webinars, news, and more.

Check it out here.

Do you have a sustainability update for your community that you would like shared? Email us at sustainablecities@asu.edu. We love local updates!

The City of Peoria recently approved its Sustainable Peoria Plan, a roadmap for sustainability that outlines goals and initiatives around its eight pillars of sustainability. 

In 2009, the City established its first Sustainability Action Plan, which was then revised and relaunched in 2012 as the Sustainability Action Plan 2.0. Following an extensive review and publication of Peoria’s Peoria 2040 General Plan, the Water Conservation and Sustainability Division began the process of developing its new Sustainability Peoria Plan, which would include community input. As part of this process, the City of Peoria enlisted the help of ASU Project Cities to facilitate four projects with students from the School of Sustainability and School of Public Affairs that would inform the City’s sustainability planning efforts and provide the foundation for its community input process. 

Continue Reading

SCN Info of Interest–October 26, 2022

October's SCN Info of Interest was sent out via email. Includes info on: 2022 Arizona Energy Future Conference, SCN workgroup meetings, webinars, news, and more.

Check it out here.

Do you have a sustainability update for your community that you would like shared? Email us at sustainablecities@asu.edu. We love local updates!

Today, the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems at ASU is proud to announce the release of Grow Organic: The Climate, Health, and Economic Case for Expanding Organic Agriculture, a joint report co-written with Natural Resources Defense Council and Californians for Pesticide Reform. Dr Kathleen Merrigan, our Executive Director and author of the 1990 law that established organic agriculture standards in the United States, Esteve G. Giraud, Nadia El-Hage Scialabba, Lena Brook, Allison Johnson, and Sarah Aird are all contributing authors.

Continue Reading

In a growing community, water is a valuable resource for the City of Peoria. The City is guided by its general planning document, PlanPeoriaAZ 2040, which outlines the City's commitment to ensuring the best quality of living for Peoria residents through the Livability Initiatives. One of its key priorities is Smart Growth, which emphasizes sustainable development, mainly conserving water resources in anticipation of future growth.

Continue Reading

To highlight some of Project Cities star students and faculty, PC staff sat down to interview Hunter Hedelius, an undergraduate student in the School of Social Transformation. During the spring 2022 semester, Hunter worked on a project with City of Peoria as part of Greg Broberg’s JUS 301 Research Methods course. As a culmination of student projects in the last three years, students in Greg’s class set out to understand how Peoria residents get information from the City about events and community services. From this, students conducted a survey of Peoria residents to understand what information is being left out of communities in order to inform recommendations for Peoria to engage its residents. Hunter analyzed the survey data and synthesized the findings for the showcase presentation.

Check out the project final summary report | Community Engagement Strategies

Continue Reading

 

ASU News interviewed SPRI co-founder, Nicole Darnall, about her upcoming appointment with the U.S. General Services Administration's (GSA) inaugural Acquisition Policy Federal Advisory Committee.  Darnall also discusses why sustainable purchasing is so important especially at the federal government level.

Check out the full interview here!