Sustainability

JEAN's Urban Educational Farm Site: M/W 8:15am-10:45am

The Nature in the Neighborhood (NITN) project grew out of the needs expressed by PSU students who desired avenues of involvement in local environmental issues, and the needs of local resource management agencies (THPRD, METRO, Portland Parks) that lacked resources to develop inventories and surveys of natural resources in the Portland area.

Multimedia Production Team

The Multimedia Production Online Capstone addresses community issues and needs by developing educational interactive online media. Continuously taught since 1999, the class has undergone adjustment to the changes in technology - from output on CD-ROMs and video, to web pages and blogs developed entirely by teams of students working completely online and working remotely, from around the world!

Grant Writing for Indigenous Sustainability   In the online Capstone course Indigenous Grant Writing, students work collaboratively in teams to research and write grants, and to understand the issues of Indigenous communities. Students gain an understanding of collaborative work and the importance of equal participation from every team member. Students examine the role of non-profit organizations in addressing social, ethical, and political issues.

Learning Gardens, Community Engagement and Sustainability. Students will explore community food security through community engagement in learning garden programs.  Class time will focus on issues of community food security and ways to create food justice through community engagement and learning gardens.

Students will work in partnership with the Clackamas River Basin Council to monitor over twenty stream sites both public and private. Local land owners will provide access to their stream side properties in order for students to collect and analyze water samples.

Following three campus class sessions in July and August, students will spend two weeks in the southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico.

Cities harbor significant natural systems, though they are often culturally miscast as the antithesis of nature.  The trend in city building over the last couple of millennia has increasingly focused on making our cities more efficient machines to support human habitation.