On May 15, 2019, our interns celebrated Maryland’s Polystyrene food-container ban with other Baltimore City School students, City Councilmembers John Bullock and Zeke Cohen, Delegate Brooke Lierman, the Office of Sustainability, the Sustainability Commission, Baltimore Community Foundation, Trash Free Maryland, Waterfront Partnership, and Blue Water Baltimore.
Applications will open for the 2023-2024 school year in September 2023.
What is the Youth Sustainability Leadership program?
Promoting youth leadership on environmental issues has always been part of the Office of Sustainability’s work. Prior to 2015, we organized the Student Environmental Leadership Action Team, a youth-led committee of the Baltimore Green Schools Network. In 2015, the Office of Sustainability took a new strategy for promoting youth environmental leadership. With the leadership of Andrea Calderón, then the City’s Youth Sustainability Coordinator, our office hired three high school student interns to help us with our efforts, forming the Youth Environmental Internship program, now known as the Youth Sustainability Leadership program.
In the first year of the internship, our interns kept a detailed blog of the many ways they learned about and promoted youth environmentalism. In the second year, they formed Baltimore Beyond Plastic and focused on removing Polystyrene from our schools, streets, and streams. In the third year, the interns continued to build on the previous year’s mission, extending efforts into advocating for a plastic bag ban, which was successfully passed at the city level. Other activities have included arts and activism events and contests, field trips, service days, and environmental education for younher students. Currently, they are working on the Sustainable Survival Kits project, examining how to support individuals experiencing homelessness in Baltimore City with their immediate material needs in the most sustainable ways possible, a concept proposed and developed by Juno Owens (recent grad, and BBP team member from 2018 to 2021).
Students of all ages and from all corners of the city are encouraged to join our work! We hold events throughout the year, including rallies, summits, workshops, and service days. Stay up to date on Instagram at @bmorebeyondplastic.
Please send any questions and applications to bmorebeyondplastic@gmail.com.
Interns Making Huge Strides
Our intern team has done amazing work on organizing other students to give input and participate in events, talking with businesses and legislators, and more. Their focus has been on anti-plastics efforts, including both city-wide and state-wide legislation, as well as City Schools policy. Here is some coverage of their work:
The Baltimore Sun, 8/6/19: Paper or plastic? Baltimore City Council weighs pros and cons of cutting that choice in half
WJZ13, 5/24/19: Maryland becomes 2nd state to ban styrofoam
WBAL, 4/19/18: Baltimore foam container ban signed into law
The Baltimore Sun, 2/6/18: Pushed by students, Baltimore council considers ban on foam food containers
Fox 45 News, 1/10/18: Baltimore public schools to use compostable lunch trays instead of styrofoam
Congratulations to Claire Wayner and Mercedes Thompson for winning the 2017 Brower Youth Award!
The Brower Youth Award is a prestigious national prize that recognizes outstanding young leaders in the environmental movement, and goes out to just six projects per year. Claire and Sadie, both current seniors at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, founded Baltimore Beyond Plastic while engaged in our Youth Environmental Internship program, focusing on getting Styrofoam replaced with products that are healthier and more sustainable.
Learn more about their work in this short video: