Dr. Colin Potts,  the vice provost for undergraduate education at Georgia Tech oversees offices and programs affecting undergraduate education including the Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain, the Center for Career Discovery and Development, the Honors Program, the Center for Academic Enrichment and the Center for Academic Success.

This summer, Georgia Tech served as a site for the annual Integrated Network for Social Sustainability (INSS) Conference, co-hosted by the Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain, the College of Engineering, and the College of Design.  The aim of the conference was to bring together a broad group of researchers, faculty, practitioners, partners, and professional association representatives to craft a Southeast Regional agenda for more in-depth coordinated research, teaching, and action on social sustainability.  The Conference supported the Center’s goal of integrating sustainability and community engagement into research and curricula across the…

A conference hosted recently by Tech’s Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain had participants look at how to blaze new paths in sustainable education and community engagement — and even took them into the field to get their hands (or rather, shoes) dirty.

The Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain, in partnership with the Integrated Network for Social Sustainability, College of Design, and College of Engineering, with funding from the National Science Foundation, hosted the Paths to Social Sustainability conference earlier this summer. The goal of the conference was to identify ways to develop stronger and more coordinated social sustainability research, teaching, and action agendas for the Southeast.  

The three-day event was attended by Tech faculty, staff, and students; industry and community partners; government partners from Atlanta and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); and representatives from other universities. The conference showcased Georgia Tech…

Iris Tien is an Assistant Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She received her Ph.D. in Civil Systems Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.

It has been more than a month since the Integrated Network for Social Sustainability (INSS) Conference, organized in part by Serve-Learn-Sustain (SLS) at Georgia Tech, and the topics we discussed still stay with me. As a civil engineer, what has specifically stuck with me, and what I think will continue to color how I think about social sustainability, is the vital role of civil infrastructure in building communities.

Since INSS, I have traveled to several cities across the U.S., both large and small, for various conferences and research meetings. As I drove along the streets in my rental car, I found myself dissecting my surroundings. I examined the curb and gutter systems, and noted if there were sidewalks or not. As I took a drink…

Ariella Ventura is a rising second year industrial engineering major, originally from Long Island, New York.

Hi! My name is Ariella Ventura and this summer I am studying abroad in Eastern Europe on Georgia Tech’s Leadership for Social Good program, specifically in Prague, Krakow, and Budapest. For this blog I would like to highlight the sustainability efforts that have caught my eye throughout my travels here in Eastern Europe.

To start off, let me walk you through my first eye opening experience.  Imagine this: You walk into a beautifully stocked grocery store and walk down the aisles grabbing all the delicious food your taste buds are dying for. After the 10-minute wait at the checkout line, you finally get to pay for your food and bring it home. But wait…… The check-out lady isn’t bagging your groceries. In fact, there are no bags at the end at all. You look around and see everyone else in the store has those “hippie” reusable bags that you bought once…

I care about Flint not because I can relate to it, and especially not because I empathize with the residents, for it is impossible to do so. I care about Flint because of how bad the situation is. Many of these kids will likely develop intellectual disabilities and behavioral problems, and have a much higher rate of ending up in jail. I can only try to imagine what it might be like to live in such a community.

The sad truth is that sometimes it takes the worst of the worst situations to really make me stop what I’m doing, and genuinely think about what it might be like to live in these communities. It takes videos of police shootings to get me upset and angry about institutional racism, not petty crime arrest statistics or unemployment rate numbers. Institutional racism is not something I grew up having to deal with, even though it was all around me.

So I go to these discussions, and I take these SLS courses, to learn how it got to be like this, how the things some…

Yonatan Weinberg is an Israeli-American who grew up in a socio-economically mixed suburb of Atlanta, and developed an interest in social issues and causes by listening to his parents discuss Israeli affairs at the dinner table.  He first recognized issues of racial disparity in high school when he realized that although his school was racially diverse, the majority of students in his AP classes were white.  Yonatan is currently a student in both SLS Core courses  this semester, learning to approach sustainability from both a systems perspective and a community perspective.  He plans to incorporate sustainability in his studies at Tech and in his future career.

I care about Flint not because I can relate to it, and especially not because I empathize with the residents, for it is impossible to do so. I care about Flint because of how bad the situation is. Many of these kids will likely develop intellectual disabilities and behavioral problems, and have a much higher…

Americans joke about a lot of first world problems, but in Flint, Michigan the issue of unclean water is no laughing matter. Often we hear about programs and innovations to get clean water to developing countries, but not to an established city in America’s heartland. 

Flint. Where children have been drinking contaminated water under the negligence of the city. 

Flint. Where children are consuming a resource that makes up 70 percent of their bodies. 

Flint. Where elders and parents, children and babies have been dosed with remnants of lead that will affect the state of their health for the rest of their lives. 

Every time I wash my dishes, drink a glass of water, rinse my fruit, or eat a piece of ice, I think about those kids in Michigan. Every time a mother boils a pot of spaghetti, I think about the poison that will be leeched into their meal. It’s relentless. To think that every time that you wash your hands or take a shower you are being poisoned…