Sustainability Ambassadors 

Empower Youth to Catalyze Community Sustainability

Empower: Learning should be relevant to solving community challenges.

Youth:  The age of apprenticeship to real-world learning.

Catalyze:  In chemistry if you add an agent to a mixture the whole thing changes.

Community:  We focus on community-scale policy, projects and performance measures. 

Sustainability:  Meeting the needs of the current generation without compromising the ability of 

future generations to meet theirs. 

“In the next two decades textbooks will become obsolete 

and grades will be silly. Students will design and manage 

real world projects resulting in measurable 

improvements in local and global sustainability. 

It’s time to initiate our youth in the responsibilities of the 21st century 

using the new three R’s - rigor, relevance, and relationship.”

Peter Donaldson – Director, Sustainability Ambassadors

Sustainability Ambassadors is a professional development program for student leaders, teacher leaders and community leaders committed to educating for sustainability by aligning classroom rigor with community relevance for real world impact.

We initiate collective impact campaigns, benchmark improvements in sustainable community conditions and report progress to peers, parents, planners, and policy makers using the informed voice of youth. 

Our work uses real-world performance measures as both entry point and outcome for problem-based, place-based curriculum design. This approach motivates students to apply academic excellence in context of community impact. 

Our professional development programs for teacher leaders support district-wide, systems change aligned with the National Action Plan for Educating for Sustainability.

Our coaching support for community and local government leaders is organized around the goals and performance measures of the national STAR Community Rating System. 

Our home geography is King County with the goal to build learning partnerships with at least 50% of the County’s 19 school districts and 39 cities. 

We believe that the community is the curriculum and that by educating for sustainability we can drive collective impact towards a significantly more promising and sustainable future.