Gear Up for Green Energy:

The Intervention​

After a month of planning, outreach, promotion, design, and construction, I finally implemented my community intervention at Corktown park on June 4th.

 

I was ready for families and youth to check out my bike generators and learn about green energy. What I was not ready for was the tidal wave of young children that flooded my station to try my bike without a parent in sight. The bike generators were a huge success: they attracted at least 30 kids throughout the evening and gave me the opportunity to engage with kids and discuss green energy. My poster and informative website, geared towards informing their parents, did not effectively inform young children about the concepts and practices of green energy. Instead, I had to improvise: to ride the bike generators, kids had to listen to my pitch, answer my questions, and write their pledge on my board. I modified my pitch and approach on the fly to better fit my actual audience.

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My greatest learning from this project: success in community intervention, and in life, is not easily quantifiable and takes many forms. Instead of using the number of survey participants, or pledge signatures, or bike generator riders to justify success or failure of my intervention, I am trying to look on a more personal scale. Was I able to incite discussions on green 
energy? Did I motivate people to consider sustainability in their lives? How did I make people feel at my intervention? The answers to these questions reveal the success of my community engagement, as well as my effectiveness as a sustainable communicator [4]. If I inspire one person to pursue sustainability, or engineering for that matter, all my efforts are worthwhile.

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