Walking the Walk: Building a New Classroom with Bregal Investments
July 13, 2023
Last month, we shared another exciting collaboration with volunteers and their families from our long-time partners Bregal Investments (Bregal). Now in its sixth year, Bregal’s corporate sponsorship of our hydroponic classroom program has provided funding for a new in-school lab each year, creating new pathways to quality climate education for thousands of students around NYC. This year, a hardworking group of volunteers joined our team of hydroponic operations specialists in assembling the indoor farming systems necessary to bring nature back into the classroom. These systems will be used to support climate education at M047 The American Sign Language and English Secondary School, and past years have included lab builds at the K527 Urban Assembly Institute of Math & Science for Youth Women, Q014 The Fairview School, K059 William Floyd, X085 Great Expectations, and M500 Unity Center for Urban Technologies.
This new lab is also a first, in that The ASL & ES School is a public school geared toward students in the deaf community, including both hearing and deaf students, as well as hard-of-hearing students. This new partnership serves as a reminder both to us and to our communities that climate education must be a collective and inclusive endeavor. For meaningful change to be realized, it’s vital that all students have the opportunity to build and participate in a diverse, sustainable future. Additionally, builds like these are important because they symbolize a continued effort on our part to walk the proverbial walk, setting the example for students in our community who may feel daunted by today’s climate challenges. By making a difference in our local NYC communities, we hope students will feel empowered to rise to the occasion and use the knowledge they have gained in school to be the change they want to see.
We want to thank the volunteers from Bregal, as well as their families, for their enthusiasm and generosity in their continued support of our program. In addition to their annual funding contributions, they braved the intense summer heat to work hands-on with hydroponic systems, spending hours of their free time building a new way to learn about the climate, one indoor farm at a time. We also want to thank the teachers and school leaders at The ASL & ES School for welcoming our program to their teaching regimen, and look forward to a flourishing partnership that will introduce thousands of new students to the wonders of sustainability science!
