24 Apr 2023
RCE Greater Atlanta Student Leaders Lay Out Path To A More Sustainable World
Students from 8 Atlanta area universities and HBCUs participated in this year-long sustainability program.

Regional Centres of Expertise (RCEs) are the result of the United Nations Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) program. Based within higher education institutions, RCEs are chartered to “translate global objectives into the context of the local communities in which they operate".

One way the RCE Greater Atlanta chapter does this is with the SDG Futures Fellowship program, which ran during the academic year from October 2022 to April 2023. This was an opportunity for student leaders to learn more about “sustainability challenges in and around Atlanta and around the world, and how communities can organize to tackle these issues".

Karmalize was honored to offer our platform for a team to conduct research and projects for community impact. Other participating organizations included City of Atlanta, Re’Generation Movement, Sustainable Georgia Futures, Center for Sustainable Communities, and the U.S. Green Building Council.

L-R: Chandler Spaulding, Fayola Waithe & Nick Tsangarides

L-R: Chandler Spaulding, Fayola Waithe & Nick Tsangarides

In the closing event of the program on April 22, 2023, each team presented their final report to their peers and program sponsors. 

The Karmalize team of Chandler Spaulding, Fayola Waithe and Nick Tsangarides took up the challenge of using social media to influence positive behavior change for social impact. The choice was made to focus on Instagram as the social media platform as it is the most popular platform with both (a) Karmalize small businesses and (b) our target audience of millennials and Gen Zs. Thank you our team for the many findings, best practices, tools, techniques and recommendations, and we look forward to putting them in place!

Our thanks also to Kris Chatfield of Georgia Tech University who led this program, along Jennifer Hirsch, Lola Owokoniran, Tameka Womack, and Aditya Desai.