An Altruistic Sustainability Network (ASN) is a partnership between SAPBL schools and teachers and the surrounding community that fosters pathways for children's altruistic citizenship.

To join the network, sign up here.

The SAPBL approach invites students to engage in local problem-solving, community building and activism. This engagement requires teachers and children to become more intimately connected to surrounding neighborhood associations, nonprofits, businesses, local government, parks and nature so that the “classroom” extends widely into the surrounding community.

All stakeholders around each school, including residents (individuals), institutions and the community, are invited to find a role to play in providing the resources, encouragement and knowledge the children need to contribute to the SDGs. For example, a local nursery can contribute potting and gardening supplies for an environmental project, employees from a local Zoo can help children learn about local wildlife habitats, and representatives of local government can help children learn about the rules that govern human activities and how those rules are created and changed.

Process

1. First, sign up to participate in the network.

2. To create an altruistic sustainability network (ASN), participating schools and teachers will have access to a Sustainability Coach to serve as a liaison between teacher(s) and community stakeholders. The coach will help initiate and nurture new school-community partnerships and relationships to create novel experiential learning opportunities.

3. Community stakeholders will be asked to form a new altruistic sustainability network (ASN) for the local school or a handful of local schools.

4. The resources, knowledge and needs of each stakeholder will be inventoried so that interconnections can be made between children’s interests, the SDGs and the resources available in the ASN. As the resources within the ASN grow, so too can the type and scale of children’s projects grow as more opportunities for community engagement and learning are opened to the school(s) within an expanding ASN network.

Whole Community Empowerment

Part of the SAPBL system is to designate a sustainability coach to each school to help it evolve into a center for community empowerment, facilitating the unity of neighborhood stakeholders as the ASN expands.