New Orleans Teens Plan A Future of Composting Success

The Climate Leaders Fellowship guides high school students in researching climate change effects within their own communities and finding solutions they can implement locally. Students partner with local organizations to launch their projects and collaborate with other students around the world to achieve their goals.

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

Read about Lou’s experience below!

Lou DIdelot
Age 18
New Orleans, Louisiana

My name is Lou DIdelot, I currently live in New Orleans in Louisiana, which is in the south of the United States. I am a senior now, almost 18 years old. I take a lot of interest in international law and business. I have lived all around the world such as Mauritius Island, Dubai, Chile, France, and Brazil so I enjoy learning about different cultures and their traditions. Because I have lived in so many countries I have been able to witness how climate change has slowly been deteriorating places I’ve lived in, or visited.

For this project, my group and I were addressing waste, especially waste when it came to food. We focused on our school rather than the city.

We decided to implement compositing by the cafeteria or find ways to educate students and classmates about how beneficial it would be for all of us to be more cautious about our waste and therefore find a solution; composting.

We got a lot of votes and information from surveys that we sent out to students, and we got some voices and opinions from classmates who possibly wanted to form a club to take more action to waste management.

We sent out Google forms and emails to the daily emails the schools send us and then analyzed what students had said. We mostly tried to reach out to the green society club, key clubs, and clubs who possibly would want to be part of the days we would commit to helping organizations such as Restart Recycling and Schmelly’s Dirt Farm.

With the support of these groups and clubs, we were more able and felt more confident to provide information and opportunities for students to be involved and learn more about composting and even recycling.

By the time the fellowship ended, we had just started looking at prices for materials to start our compositing idea within the school, however, a great number of students were positive and motivated to engage in our project. We hope that by the end of this school year, we will have created a club and implemented composting.

Participating in the Climate Fellowship was a great experience, and I would be glad to be an Alumni of this fellowship as my group and I will continue to take an interest in our world’s issues concerning climate change and finding solutions.

I am proud of my project and where my group and I have gotten, and I am very eager to finish it. I am also proud of the skills I have developed throughout this program, especially my problem-solving skills and time-management skills as we had limited time to come up with a solution to an important issue that needed some thought process.