Join us for the fourth Sustainability Showcase speaker in our 2021-22 Driving It Home series, which explores issues of community resilience. Our speaker will be Stephen Ritz, educator and urban farmer, who will be speaking about “The Green Bronx Machine: Growing Something Greater!”

The Green Bronx Machine originated as an after-school education program that has grown into a program building healthy, equitable, and resilient communities through inspired education, local food systems, and 21st Century workforce development. Dedicated to cultivating minds and harvesting hope, its school-based model uses urban agriculture aligned to key school performance indicators to grow healthy students and healthy schools that transform communities that are otherwise fragmented and marginalized .

The Sustainability Showcases make connections between faculty research, personal and professional interest and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals while broadening the discourse surrounding sustainability. Speakers are invited to give a 45-minute talk, answer questions and hang around to mingle with attendees.

Facing COVID-19 and climate change, and having national conversations about racism and anti-Blackness in America, has made it clear — as last year’s Showcase theme suggested, the time to act for a more sustainable world is now. The Penn State community can and should be at the forefront of this change.

This is why our theme this year is theme of – Driving it Home – exploring the origins and meanings of home, identify local social and environmental issues that hit home for students and other attendees, and empower attendees to begin addressing those issues to make communities more resilient.