I was thirteen years old when I discovered volunteer work. I was also thirteen years old when I joined my high school’s Environmental Club. At the time, these seemed like two separate events; thirteen-year-old me was just pursuing two completely different interests at the same time.

However, it wasn’t until recently that I realized these two interests – sustainability and civic engagement – were rooted in one core concept: community.

 

Every living, breathing member of a community has a right to work towards the betterment of that respective community. Whether natural or anthropogenic, local or global, we are part of different communities that require our participation to maintain their function. Civic engagement looks like active citizens working to realize and address social issues that face members of their society – issues like hunger and homelessness. Civic engagement needs communal collaboration in order to be effective and yield positive change and development for the community. Sustainability, too, requires this type of community-first thinking and collaboration in order to be truly effective. We live in a world that has a finite amount of resources that can be regenerated within a certain time for a certain amount of living beings. Whether we choose to believe it or not, there exists a commons from which we gather our needs. Commons activism refers to the duty we have to protect things we all share and ensure that everybody is able to at least satisfy their basic needs from the commons. Both sustainability and civic engagement use commons activism to address inequities within socially constructed systems and imbalanced cycles in the natural world.

 

This past week I had the benefit of attending a summit that looked at the issues facing people experiencing homelessness and how providing housing and other services can not only be beneficial for the individuals, but the community they’re a part of as well. The Office of Sustainability worked in conjunction with the Center for Civic Engagement and Aramark to help divert waste from the landfill by making the event Zero Waste. It was really interesting to see the different members of the Charleston community come together to talk about the issue and hear from representatives of organizations in other cities that work with homelessness and housing first programs.

 

Community-first thinking is an important part of active and engaged citizenship and sustainability; it is the lens through which we view the world. However, it is only the first step; it is what we do with what we’ve seen with that lens that makes a lasting impact.

Maybe thirteen-year-old me didn’t know exactly what she was getting herself into when she joined the Environmental Club and started volunteering, or maybe she did. Either way, twenty-one-year old me sure is glad for the journey, the experiences, and the sense of knowing, with certainty, that communities can sustain themselves long after individuals expire.   

-Nicole Fernandez ’16