On Wednesday, March 30, from 6:00-7:30 p.m., IU South Bend will participate in a Worldwide Teach-In on Climate and Social Justice. The event will be moderated locally at the Civil Rights Heritage Center, 1040 W. Washington St., South Bend. The meeting will also include participants via Zoom.
IU South Bend will join over 1000 other communities in the Worldwide Teach-In, spearheaded by Bard College. The national web page for the project emphasizes the need for positive energy in the face of daunting challenges.
Bard has taken the lead as part of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, and IUSB is a member campus of that organization. As we’ve been planning this event, it’s been at the forefront of our thinking to keep in line with the intent on Bard’s website, said organizer and sustainability lecturer Krista Bailey. The goal is not just to share information about climate change, but also to use that data to leverage us towards a more sustainable vision of how we live, work, and play.
Bailey will give brief opening and closing remarks, but the discussion will be otherwise presented and moderated by undergraduates and graduate students in IU South Bend’s Sustainability Studies Program. They will give a series of presentations on how climate change has impacted societies locally, nationally, and internationally, with a particular focus on food insecurity. A student-moderated question-and-answer session follows the presentations.
Mostly, the focus will be on solutions, Bailey said. Now that we know these things, where do we go? What are steps we can all take? Ideally, every participant will leave the event with an idea of something they can and will do.
Bard’s Solve Climate By 2030 project emphasizes realistic optimism and warns against climate despair. In the face of the grim statistics that we know about the impact of climate change, it is crucial to embrace the meaningful approaches that can still mitigate outcomes favorably.
The students are very sensitive to that, too. They want to see solutions and they want to see action, said Dr. Deborah Marr, an associate professor of Biology and a member of the Sustainability Studies Program’s affiliated faculty. They’re thinking in terms of how to bring people together to discuss these complex issues, and how to move forward on them. They chose food insecurity as their central theme because food insecurity affects a lot of people in our region, and there are concrete solutions that can be put into place.
Corinne Jones, an undergraduate student majoring in sustainability studies, will give a presentation about food insecurity issues in the South Bend area. She says that food insecurity was chosen as the theme because it is a problem we can address quickly and efficiently.
The facts are our bottom line, but there is positivity and hope in everything we do, Jones said.
To participate, either attend this free event live at the Civil Rights Heritage Center at 1040 W. Washington St. in South Bend or join via Zoom: iu.zoom.us/my/crhciusb.
