TEEN GROUP – ENVIRONMENT

During this past fall semester a five-year dream to join WSU Landscape Architecture students with a team of high school students in support of the Hillyard neighborhood’s efforts to revitalize itself was finally realized. This next group of award winners helped to create the “Solviva Project” which is a neighborhood project to build a 5-year experimental residential and food producing development that is as close to self-sustaining as possible. Throughout the 15-week term they would regularly met with their university counterparts, and neighborhood clients. These five young people exceeded all expectations as they researched various passive energy collection systems, water collection, treatment techniques, fabrication and building materials, climatic constraints, and more. They were aware of Hillyard’s hope to gather data that will influence not only the neighborhood but also the city and county’s future land use regulations, building codes, local food production, and start-up green industries. No one asked them, but they had their own ideas of how this project could be expanded beyond Hillyard.