Leadership Through Service: My Experience as a Service Trip Site Leader
As an undergraduate at the University of Colorado (CU) at Boulder I had the privilege of coordinating the EcoReps Program for two years. I curated a diversity of different volunteer and service opportunities as part of the socio-environmental focused curriculum I developed and taught to the 35+ students in the year long program. Though the curriculum was broad, over time I found myself acquiring a distinct skill set in coordinating the development of various projects and in supporting “EcoReps” to have a tangibly beneficial impacts beyond just the immediate community.
The large number of international and out of state students accepted to become EcoReps provided the impetus for me to seek funding, and eventually training, to become a Service Trip Site Leader and create a completely unique service trip. Given the program’s social and environmental focus, I wanted the service trip to feature these as well as make a demonstratively beneficial impact to a community outside of Colorado. I eventually landed on Earthship Biotecture outside of Taos, NM. After several discussions, I knew that Earthship Biotecture was a perfect fit as they have enriched their local and international community and are pioneering an innovative way of living that reduces consumption and increases quality of living. Ultimately, learning alongside their architects and builders provided the opportunity to further develop resourcefulness, systems thinking, and user centered design thinking (a few moments perusing their website will highlight this).
While leading a large group of students to do a service trip helping to build Earthships in another state certainly had it’s challenges, I was able to continue refining my ability to coordinate complex projects and apply this in a truly novel context (every Earthship and service trip is unique). Though novel, this context was still in the United States. Fortunately, we were able to vicariously go beyond this context as we learned alongside a group of 30+ international citizens participating in the Earthship Academy who lent a great amount of insight on the sustainability practices in their respective countries.
The resourceful, systems thinking, and user centered design approach brought to the table by these international citizens and Earthship Biotecture have contributed to creating and adding a massive amount of value in Taos and around the world. This mixing of ideas and “can do” attitude is what I tried to cultivate in the EcoReps Program and is what I now strive to cultivate at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory where we are working on international teams both within the lab and abroad.
International collaboration is critical as everyone has the power and responsibility to cultivate space for sharing diverse perspectives; the world would be a better place if we all empower each other in this way. However, this is rarely enough. The world needs these same people to radically care so much that they “out-work” and and “out-innovate” to manifest sustained and beneficial change. This kind of approach is exactly what Mike Reynolds, the founder of Earthsip Biotecture, did. Hence, I will leave you with my strongest recommendation to watch the documentary that was made about his challenges and what he and his team did to overcome them in order to make Earthship Biotecture into what it is today.
Thanks for reading!
