Lark Circularity Internship

Timeline

2024

Description

Affiliated programs: Green Devils Intern Program, Say the Thing, Kenan Institute for Ethics

Summary

Say The Thing, a collaboration between the Duke Chapel and the Kenan Institute for Ethics, is a project aimed to give students community and frameworks to engage in moral agency development and personal storytelling. Student interns were tasked to identify, collect, and repurpose waste from different Duke campus partners for pop-up events, developing meaningful activities with a variety of stakeholders. These events transformed landfill-bound items into art through creative activities like screen printing and blackout poetry, fostering sustainability, creativity, and community engagement. Documentation was another important task to promote accessible and centralized data to facilitate continuity and circularity

Goals

1. Develop partnerships with campus stakeholders to identify and collect waste
2. Organize and manage pop-up events throughout the semester
3. Brainstorm creative activities that incorporate waste
4. Develop systems to operationalize the mapping, reception, and storage of said materials

Experience and Learning Outcomes

This project was part of the year-long paid internship Green Devils program managed by the Office of Climate and Sustainability. Across events and pop-up programs, the students engaged with over a thousand individuals across campus. Their work was highlighted by Duke Magazine as well as a feature in the SCALe Spotlight series.

Students reported enhancing skills such as resource use efficiency, creative idea development, stakeholder engagement, and event planning and program management.

Recommendations

Continue to cultivate relationships around campus to identify discarded materials and opportunities for pop-ups. Additionally, consider strategies that would allow for scaling Say the Thing's vision for circularity both across and beyond Duke.

Student Interns: Lalie Marie and Yujin Kim

Intern Supervisor: Leah Torrey, Director of Special Initiatives at Duke Chapel