Monterey Project Sparks Change with Proper Recycling and Climate Change Awareness

The Climate Leaders Fellowship program teaches students about climate change and environmental sustainability, and guides them in designing and launching a volunteer project in their own communities.

The fellowship is offered as a collaboration between the Stanford University Deliberative Democracy Lab and the Rustic Pathways Foundation.

Read about Daniel’s impactful experience below!

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Daniel Lee
Age 16
Monterey, California

Hi! My name is Daniel. I am 16 years old and currently in 10th grade, attending a boarding school in Monterey, Central Coast of California. I am originally from South Korea and have lived in many different places. I love adventures and meeting new people. The more I’ve spent time exploring the world, the more I realized the importance of taking care of where I live, whether it be my room or the bigger part of the world I live in.

Living near the beautiful beaches and forests of California, I always felt the need to protect them for the next generations, although having zero knowledge of how to. I was constantly faced with an impotent feeling that I, alone, could create no impact, which I knew I wasn’t the only one feeling as such.

However, participating in the Climate Leaders Fellowship this fall allowed me to overcome this helpless feeling and dig deeper into how I can take more responsibility as an individual to take care of where I live, even empowering others along the way.

I started my project by researching the detrimental impacts of climate change on my community. I thought the urgent issues would happen in the bigger parts of my community such as the marine environment and forests, where I felt powerless to take action.

Unlike what I had expected though (turns out Monterey is actually doing pretty good conserving those areas), many of the issues are related to small minor things people do such as reducing waste, proper recycling, and most importantly feeling empowered to take action. These initiatives are actually very dependent on individual efforts. This is basically what my project centered around: doing the small things right.

In order to diagnose the issues and ways to mitigate them, I reached out to various people and organizations including my science teacher and an amazing local non-profit called Save Our Shores.

We had interviews where we discussed Monterey’s initiatives to combat climate change, education, bringing sustainability through smart consumerism and more. But really, the interviews seemed to center around one theme: how do I contribute to creating a sustainable place, and do my efforts really matter?

After a long discussion with Ms. Dempsey, the education director of Save Our Shores, I landed on some kind of conclusion or rather, reasons to take action. While it is true that you, alone, cannot make the biggest difference, your small actions can make some incredible things happen. They inspire other people.

Your effort to reduce food waste at lunch might inspire your friends to do the same, or at least inspire them to think about the environment. Then, the impact becomes grand, possibly being augmented onto a community scale.

Besides, it’s never a bad thing to take care of where you live. It is actually said to help your mental health. By contributing to mitigating climate change issues such as water pollution and deforestation, you are contributing to your own health.

To implement doing the small things right and also to inspire others, I made a poster promoting proper recycling and explaining how to do it, which I then put on the trash bins at my school.

The next important thing we addressed in the interview was education, especially how to empower people to take action and express their voices. Something that was brought up in the interview that we both agreed on was that, though people acknowledge climate change is real, they do not know how it’s impacting our daily lives, therefore dissociating themselves from it.

On this note, I felt the need to spread awareness and accurate information about the impacts of climate change on my community. To do so, I researched on my own as well as communicated with experts in various organizations where I correctly identified various ongoing climate change issues and insight into how people can all contribute to mitigating them in their own ways.

After researching and making Google slides to put the information, I presented the slides to my peers in my environmental club where I emphasized the need for individual actions against pollution along with the bigger community’s efforts.

Along with the presentation, I started creating a blog to post updates on climate change in Monterey and present ways to contribute to bringing sustainability.

To raise awareness, I also ran a bake sale at my school where I collected monetary donations. About 120 dollars went into Save Our Shores which runs various educational programs about how to combat climate change for people of different age groups.

My biggest takeaway from this wonderful two-month experience is that you, as an individual, can make a positive impact on the world by doing the small things, and then the rest will fall into place.