Recently, my research into local sites aimed at solving water equity issues in communities has proven unsuccessful. While the sites that I have found in and outside of Heartlands have offered great opportunities for community involvement and volunteering, they still fell short of my goal of giving young adults a reason to be interested in water conservation. I want to give Heartlands a way to connect to people within my age range who are willing to invest some of their time into aiding conservation organizations that work in their region. Now, I have decided the best way to reach this goal is to cut out local sites and connect Heartlands to young adults through SIUE instead.
SIUE has a large number of students who fit the “young adult” age range. Besides meeting this criterion, there are many students who currently take classes related to ecology and water resources as well. In order to reach these particular students, the method I am going for is to reach out to the professors of these courses and have them connect the students to Heartlands. I created a list of 40 courses that would either mention or teach concepts related to ecology. Among the many core subjects were anthropology, biology, chemistry, civil engineering, and environmental science. Even though not every course listed will go about teaching ecology, I made sure that the outliers were at least related to a type of science. Afterwards, I found the professors who will be teaching each course next semester, which brings me to my new product for this project.
My plan is not to sign each professor up for a specific program or give them a site to visit. Instead, I merely want to set up contact between these teachers and Heartlands Conservancy, so that they have a list of potential SIUE professors. All I need to do now is separate the professors who are interested from the professors who are not, which I will be doing through a survey. Using the list I have just come up with, I plan on sending the 40 professors a survey that questions their interest in working with community organizations on water equity issues. Some questions ask about the professor about their experience working with community organizations while others ask the professor how they believe their students could benefit from partnering with local organizations. After I receive responses from the professors, I will send these results to Heartlands so that they will know which teachers they can collaborate with.
In the end, Heartlands Conservancy will have a long list of professors at SIUE that they can partner with in order to connect to an even longer list of young adults. Although it is unfortunate that my original plans for this project did not turn out the way that I expect, I believe that my new product will prove a lot more useful to Heartlands in the long run. As I have stated already, the sites that I found were engaging, but not motivative enough for the average young adult. If I want to get people my age involved in water conservation, finding those who are already interested in ecology and introducing them to Heartlands is the best approach.