A Bite Into the Big Apple Our Food Justice Cookbook and Reflections on our Food and Sustainability Focused Gap Year Semester by Clara Pitt and Leila Tilin We chose to spend the first half of our gap year semester with the Living City Project (LCP) investigating the NYC food system, its inner workings, and the people and organizations that are fighting for justice and change within this system. We felt guided by one question specifically: How can we build a sustainable and equitable food system that respects our diversity, nourishes our citizens, and protects our planet? We chose to study…
Sustainability
Holistic and Sustainable Travel by Sydney Yelton With gap years on the rise, and people becoming comfortable traveling across borders again, it’s time to seriously think about the way we traveled in the past, and how we want travel to look like today and in the future. The global pandemic has given travel a new platform. There has been an opportunity, just like every other industry and system within our world, for the people to re-evaluate our actions and ideas around travel. We can either treat this time as a reset, a chance to be better, or stick to old…
Insetting vs Offsetting Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Daniel Ponce-Taylor Students that participate in gap year programs can emit more CO2 than some of the communities in which they engage emit in an entire year. There is no way around the fact that our field activities emit a lot of carbon when traveling to remote locations. As an industry, we must do something about that! 2020 and 2021 have seen an increase in climate change-related disasters; climate change is real, is here, and it affects all communities, affluent and low-income alike. California saw the largest wildfire season in modern history in…
Spain by Train: A Journey Toward Sustainable Experiential Education and Language Learning by Arantxa Lopez My brother Mikel and I founded our language school, ID Languages, in 2014 and we have designed and delivered experiential language programs in Ireland and Spain since. Our focus was always immersive language learning but, after the first few years, we realised that there was so much more to our work: we had built a beautiful international community where our students’ younger siblings, cousins and friends were visiting us on a yearly basis. They established close links with their host families and some of them…
My Experience as a Black Participant-Turned-Leader of the Rising Earth Immersion by Psalms White, originally published under the same title on the Eco Institute Blog. Posted with permission from the author. As I do believe in a higher power, it feels like divine intervention that my path has converged with the Eco-Institute’s —a hidden gem just 20 minutes from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I received my undergraduate degree in May of 2020. While I was in college, I had no knowledge this space even existed before my friend Abbey participated in the Eco-Institute’s Rising Earth…
How You Can Practice Sustainability this Earth Day as an Individual or Organization by Louise Crowe, Co-Chair of GYA’s Sustainability Committee As climate change and environmental concerns grow as issues for individuals and organizations, eco-anxiety is on the rise. Many of us want to prioritize sustainability, but how can we each do our part? The Gap Year Association’s Sustainability Committee is working towards creating some useful resources that both individuals and organizations will find useful to start creating a more positive impact. This Earth Day (April 22nd), we want to share some of the tips that you might be…