Hi everyone,

I am Stephanie, an ee360 Community EE Fellow and wanted to share about a project that I worked on this year, called Sadhu for Green!

I have continued this into an example of Urban EE because the Khmer community that I work with is concentrated in urban areas. Because of the way our cities tend to be designed, many residents are shielded from the inconvenience and emotional impact of seeing where our waste goes after we flush it or put it in our street carts for pick up. This is not always the case, especially when institutional racism leads to neglects of neighborhoods or regions of a city via inequitable distribution of resources. However, even in those situations, there are often more immediate basic needs that take precedent over recycling correctly. Validating this perspective and understanding why this may be the case is one of the first steps that all environmental educators must know when engaging in Urban Environmental Education. Sadhu for Green emerged from my desire to connect with the Khmer community (a community that I identify with) because I saw a lot of one-time use plastics, styrofoam, and food waste filling up bags and bags of garbage. By immersing myself in the community through volunteer opportunities not pertaining to environmental education, I came to meet more community leaders. By showing up authentically and expressing my personal commitments to environmental health, community leaders noticed this and began seeing where our community could improve. Both community environmental education and urban environmental education require long-term investment and an authentic connection with the community that is being focused on!

Alright - enough of that context! Onto what Sadhu for Green actually is:

Sadhu for Green is a Khmer (Cambodian) American initiative to increase awareness of environmental issues in the Khmer Community in Seattle, WA. I partnered with Prenz Sa-Ngoun, a former Khmer American monk, who resided at Wat Khemarak Pothiram in South Seattle (South Park). He and I have collaborated on three Waste Education workshops that have been held at the temple. Our hope has been to engage Khmer and Khmer Americans in our community across generations and develop the local temple to be a place of learning and community building for young people. At the same time, we aimed to influence and engage temple leadership to implement waste reductions strategies so that more Khmer families may be reached at the temple.

We began this educational initiative so that the temple and its leadership can learn how to reduce their utility bill and embody Buddhist values of respecting the earth that were live on. After a series of educational workshops in the community, Sadhu for Green culminated with a community celebration at Seward Park to share the environmental learnings with the rest of our community. At this celebration, we centered environmental health by partnering with Seattle Parks & Recreation. A Naturalist led a scavenger hunt of the park to engage our younger attendees and their families while our education booth focused on collecting wisdom of Khmer elders and hopes of the Khmer community. Additionally, we engaged the Buddhist monks from Wat Khemarak Pothiram to demonstrate a waste sorting activity on stage. Following this, community members could compare their time to the monks’ times and receive thank-you gifts for participation. Overall, Sadhu for Green has been a success and will continue to grow!

I am sharing this to demonstrate that behavior change can happen in any community, although it is really slow and takes persistence. Most of all though, it requires connection to people and each other, which will extend deeper than the actual behavior change. While yes, Sadhu for Green is working on behavior change (sorting waste into garbage, compost, and recycling), it is a much larger movement than that. When our elders see young Khmer people caring about the community, saving money and resources, and Khmer culture/traditions, they are more receptive to what it is we want to share with them. And when we have the patience to show them how, while laughing and sharing food, it just might stick.