The upper school Green Team hosted a college panel with club alumni on creating sustainable change in a university setting last Friday.

Current club officers led a Q&A session with Anvi Banga (’20), Alex Shing (’20) and Anthony Shing (’20), freshmen at Barnard, Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) and Pitzer College, respectively, who talked to current club members about their environment work in college.

At Barnard, Anvi worked on a sustainability rating system of companies that students on campus were looking to work at, and at WashU, Alex has worked with local environmental advocacy efforts within the St. Louis community. At Pitzer, Anthony worked as the environmental representative this year in the student senate, meeting with the sustainability committee, which is a group of faculty at Pitzer that manages sustainability initiatives.

“It was really interesting to hear their perspective on climate advocacy and how their view of it shifted from high school to college,” Siddhi Jain (9), who attended the event, said. “It caused me to apply what I’m learning in school a little bit more and try to get more people involved in what I’m doing.”

The three talked about ways that the community can continue sustainability efforts at the upper school through the pandemic, looking at ways to incorporate learning into community service.

“Community service is really important. Surrounding and incorporating community action into education is very fundamental in a sense that it gets people to actually see the issues at hand,” Alex said during the event. “At Harker, we live in a very enclosed bubble, so often [times], you get stuck in an educational atmosphere, but by actually seeing the effects of what we’re learning, specifically on the environmental path, then I think people will not only learn about it but also see and implement solutions within those communities.”