EnACT

In the US alone 30-40% of food is wasted every year. Wasted food that ends up in landfills releases methane emissions. According to the US EPA, methane emissions are more than 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The energy and water used to produce that food are also wasted. These reasons alone make this UNSDG, goal 2 “Zero ... Read More

The purpose of our Student Leadership Exchange (SLX) project project is to be able to effectively spread accurate information about Gay Rights, Transgender Rights, LGBTQ+ rights, legistlation surrounding thoses topics, and activism opportunities to support the LGBTQ+ community. We discovered that the best way to reach the age demographic that we are trying to inform, 9-24 year olds, is ... Read More

A four-day school week benefits students at IMSA and other schools that have piloted a four-day school week. Our proposal is to educate about the benefits of four-day school weeks at Illinois high schools. The benefits of this school schedule include less financial pressure on schools, less teacher turnover, higher staff morale, lower transportation costs and improved scores in reading ... Read More

We are focusing on UNSDG 10, reduced inequalities, and specifically for us, economic inequalities. Reducing inequalities at all levels is crucial for ensuring a decent and improving quality of life for all people. According to the German Socioeconomic Panel, during the decade following German Reunification, as incomes in former East Germany began to catch up to West German levels, ... Read More

Our project is based upon and surrounds the issue of educational inequity within Afghanistan, primarily towards women. With the current political climate in Afghanistan influenced by the Taliban and highly discriminatory towards women, educational inequity has been a prominent issue within Afghanistan in recent years. With over 3.7 million children in Afghanistan not in school, and over 60 percent ... Read More

Our project is to organize a march and a summit for the environment. This would all be led by student leaders and our main audience would also be students, as it’s important to educate them on the issues of climate change. Our plan is to have local student leaders talk about their progress working with schools, organizations, and municipalities to ... Read More

In our SLX we specifically talk about race and relating it back to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDG) that is Good Health and well being. We go into depth how about race impacts Good health and Well Being to find a problem. The problem we see a lot now days is racial disparites in health care. For ... Read More

The goal of our Student Leadership Exchange (SLX) project is to spread awareness about racial discrimination and socioeconomic disparities within education. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (UN SDG) that connects to this is Quality Education, or UN SDG number four. In the American education system, factors such as race and socioeconomic status play a large role in creating ... Read More

Illinois resides within a developed nation, yet it still retains places that do not have access to clean, usable water. Often, this problem goes unseen as citizens outside those areas believe all are so lucky to have this necessary commodity. Even so, the actions from these citizens, whether tacitly or explicitly, negatively impacts the decreasing abundance of clean water ... Read More

Roughly 4.13 million tons of trash is produced each year in the city of Chicago, approximately 70% of which is compostable. Our step towards reducing trash pollution, specifically within Chicago, is to implement city wide composting. By composting we can significantly lower the amount of trash produced, in result decreasing greenhouse gas emissions. In order to successfully execute composting ... Read More

A major problem faced in the Illinois area is the overwhelming amount of invasive plant species. One singular invasive plant species can disrupt an entire ecosystem of native life, causing biodiversity to significantly be altered and decline. A native species can be defined as, according to USGS.gov, is an organism that is not native to the ecosystem they are ... Read More

In 1952 Christine Jorgenson completed a sex-reassignment surgery and became known as the first person in America to undergo the transition. This was simply the beginning of a movement to fight for the rights of transgender individuals. Today the struggle for transgender persons continues, most commonly seen with medical restrictions and in high-school sports. Since the beginning of 2021, ... Read More

With gender prevalent issues overtaking the world, even a small action can be of great effect. Knowing the power that the internet and social media can have on an issue, we plan on making social media forums to educate people of the many many issues such as gender bias in education and the gender pay gap. We feel that ... Read More

In recent years, the term neurodivergency has become more widely used. People are starting to accept that different people’s brains operate differently and this isn’t a bad thing. Schools are some of the first places students learn to socialize and are also filled with hindrances to learning for the nuerodivergent student body, such as overstimulation and a lack of patience. ... Read More

The Heart Bill (Senate Bill 8) in Texas prohibits abortion once a heartbeat is detected. A heartbeat in a fetus can be detected around 6 to 7 weeks (sometimes earlier) and most women do not know they are pregnant at this time. This law does not accommodate rape or incest situations and state law requires two visits to the ... Read More

We found inspiration for this project through the recent anti-LGBTQ+ legislation decreed in various states. In Illinois, the current Board of Education’s mandates on LGBTQ+ educational curriculum are very limited and not enforced in public schools, which we as students have personally experienced and witnessed. This inspired us to explore a legislative activism avenue for our project where we intend ... Read More