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Profile: Alka Prasad www.treepeople.org , click on 'Generation Earth' By Nancy Pfeffer Alka is first and foremost an environmental educator. In her role as Service Learning Administrator for local non-profit Tree People, she works with middle school and high-school teachers, supporting them with training, information, and resources. Of course, working with lots of teachers is a way to reach even more students. And the great news is, WEC helped make this connection possible. Alka was finishing a course on writing for children and teenagers from the Institute of Children's Literature, Connecticut, but had kept up her contacts in the environmental education field by attending fairs, networking and surfing the Web. She heard of WEC and found our website through a resource directory of environmental education links. Alka was inspired when she saw that women from diverse backgrounds founded WEC. She contacted LA Chapter president Jennifer Bell and attended a meeting in January 2002, where the topic of discussion was the new Environmental Charter High School (ECHS) in Lawndale. At the meeting, she talked one-on-one with the WEC members. Considering her interest in ECHS, Nancy sent her resume to Alison Suffet, the school's founder. Alka laughs when she recalls that at first, Alison thought she wanted a job as a teacher – but Alka is what's known as a "non-formal educator" – someone who is in the business of education, but does not have a teaching credential. Alka provides professional development for teachers. Alison was once the Service Learning Coordinator at TreePeople herself, and so the connection was made. After Alka's resume passed through a few more hands, she got an interview and landed the job. Alka does her work through a five-year-old program called "Generation Earth." Generation Earth is an environmental education program of the County of Los Angeles, presented under contract by Tree People. According to the program's website, the County started the program for two reasons: 1) teens are important "agents of change" who influence friends and family, and 2) environmental impacts are truly the sum of many individual choices and actions. The program incorporates a "from youth to youth" approach to assure that students get the most out of its messages. Service learning is a teaching and learning approach that integrates community service with academic study to enrich learning, teach civic responsibility and strengthen communities. In 1989, legislation was passed that marked a dramatic shift in solid waste management principles and practices in California. Assembly bill (AB) 939, the California Integrated Waste Management Act, was the foundation of this new approach. The law required that cities and counties divert 25 percent of all waste from landfills and transformation facilities by the year 1995; and fifty percent by the year 2000. Through the Generation Earth program teachers and students get involved in environmental service learning projects on recycling, composting, illegal dumping, source reduction, storm water/urban runoff, and household hazardous waste. The program views students as a resource to help meet the law's goals. To make the program more fun, it includes a "Battle of the Schools" to see who can reduce the most waste. Students learn how to do waste audits and watershed audits, and apply their learning both at school and at home. As of last fall, the program had reached nearly 75,000 students through classroom presentations and activities. Generation Earth educators had launched 285 service-learning projects from which over 280,000 students have benefited! What Alka enjoys most is "empowering and educating" teachers with new knowledge and new resources. Her enthusiasm is obvious when she talks about the Summer Institute coming up in a few weeks. The program is designed to give middle-school and high-school teachers and non-formal educators a broader perspective on environmental concepts, such as water, land & natural resources and personal responsibility in the urban environment and the issues associated with them. This year's program, for which the teachers get continuing education credits, will include two days of training on urban stormwater runoff and waste management and field trips to the Burbank recycling center and the Sunshine Canyon landfill. In her native India, Alka completed a Master's degree and a M. Phil (the degree before a doctorate) in botany, and originally planned to be a scientist. However, she found research too narrow – a whole year spent studying just two plants was long enough for her – and in her "heart of hearts" she wanted to do ecology. She went to work as a program officer for the Center for Environmental Education in Ahmedabad. This autonomous agency is a "Center of Excellence" affiliated with the Ministry of Environment and Forests. There she organized education workshops for teachers and maintained a databank of activities from which they would develop lesson plans in topics like biodiversity or waste management. Later she worked as a program officer for the World Wildlife Fund in Delhi, the city where she lived longest in India. The teachers, students, and inhabitants of Los Angeles County are lucky that she has brought her environmental education skills here!
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