Portland Clean Energy Fund supports student-driven climate action projects

The new Climate Friendly Public Schools program is just beginning. It will provide as much as $10,000 per school for public middle and high school students in seven districts over the next five years. The Portland Clean Energy Fund is providing the program $50 million. Portland Public Schools’ share is close to $20 million. The idea is to support public school students to create their own projects and spur innovation in the climate solution space.

Joining us to give us more details and discuss what this looks like at PPS is Petal Peloquin, a senior at Grant High School; Eesa Taylor, a junior at Ida B. Wells High School; and Ari Ettinger, the climate resiliency program manager for PPS.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OBB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Six years ago, Portland voters approved the Portland Clean Energy Fund. It imposed tax on large retailers in the city, and has brought in much more money than originally anticipated. A city economist said earlier this year that it may generate $1.5 billion through 2028. Portland students will have a direct say in how some of that money is spent with the new Climate Friendly Public Schools program. Over the next five years, it’ll provide as much as $15,000 a year in each public middle school, high school and K-8 school in seven districts that operate in the city. Students will be the ones to propose and implement climate-focused projects.

I’m joined now by three people who are going to be taking part in this program. Petal Peloquin is a senior at Grant High School; Eesa Taylor is a junior at Ida B. Wells High School; and Ari Ettinger is PPS’s climate resiliency program manager. It’s great to have all three of you on the show.

Petal Peloquin: Thank you.

Ari Ettinger: Great to be here, thanks.

Eesa Taylor: Great to be here.

Miller: Petal, first – how did you first get involved in climate action?

Peloquin: It’s a long story. My dad, he always cared about the planet. He’s a landscaper, so he cares a lot, and I grew up with it. And then eventually during COVID I got really bored and I started experimenting in different youth groups, climate justice groups around Portland. And that kind of got me in. And then high school, I started a club with some friends, and that’s where I am now.

Miller: In recent years, various climate change walkouts in Portland [and] around the world have gotten a lot of attention. But among the student body as a whole, where would you put climate change on a list of concerns?

Peloquin: I mean, I think for a lot of people it’s pretty low. We talk about it a lot in our science classes and we have a few classes that focus on the subject, but I don’t think people seek it out as much as I have, because it’s always just been talked about as something that’s happening. It’s never been an exciting, new, something fun I guess.

Miller: Eesa, what about you? How did you get involved in climate action?

Taylor: My freshman year of high school, there was a student strike/student walkout. During the school day, a lot of students went, I think it was a courthouse in downtown to protest. And so I didn’t go to it, but it brought it to my mind, the issue. I’d known about it for a while, but I didn’t really think about it until then. And so my sophomore year, I found some opportunities to join some PPS teams for climate justice and I jumped on those opportunities. And that’s how I got in.

Miller: Petal mentioned a club that she helped form at Grant. What does climate action look like right now at Ida B. Wells, which is just up the hill from us right now?

Taylor: There was a climate justice club last year, but it’s dissolved now, and so there’s not much going on right now. But currently, I’m working on starting my own climate justice club called the Clean Air Club, because I really do want the school to be more involved with climate action.

Miller: Ari, a fundamental piece of this program is that it’s student-led, meaning that students are going to come up with the projects and then do it themselves with, from my understanding, only limited adult guidance or support. What do you see as the biggest challenges with that?

Ettinger: So we are going to do our best to provide support and guidance where we can for students. One of the really great things about this program is that it’s going to set aside some funding as well for adult guidance and for central office support, so that we can really help students have success with the projects that they’re working on. But I think that as Petal and Eesa have alluded to, one of the challenges we face is really drumming up this excitement and this idea among students that they really can do something about climate change, and that that can be exciting work, it can be community driven and collaborative. I think having actual financial resources to show students that we really mean it when we say we want to support you in taking concrete climate action and designing climate projects that are meaningful to you, is going to make a huge difference.

Miller: Eesa, does that feel different? Saying to you and your fellow students, “we’re actually going to give you control over this chunk of money at the school level,” have you experienced anything like that before?

Taylor: Well, no, I haven’t experienced anything like that before. We’re actually getting money that we can spend on projects. It feels a lot more different, because now we actually have a tangible impact in the form of money and the projects that come from it.

Miller: Ari, has it been hard figuring out the balance of adult oversight or support and student leadership? Because in a sense, it’s adults relinquishing power.

Ettinger: No, for me and our small team of climate advocates and climate justice folks at the district, I think that this is why we got into this work, is to be able to support young people in coming up with novel solutions that really matter to them, that matter to their own communities and their groups of friends. I think for a long time, adults have told young people what to do or what’s allowed to be done when it comes to climate work. And so any kind of challenge in finding that balance I think is outweighed by the excitement we have around getting to give control to students and support them, and also find out what kinds of really amazing grassroots solutions come out of that we probably have dismissed or haven’t thought of over the years.

Miller: Well, let’s turn to some of those possibilities right now. Petal, first – what are you considering in terms of possible projects to put forward in a proposal?

Peloquin: At my club specifically, we have a lot of different ideas that have come forward since we heard about PCEF. And one of them was a bike shop or a bike library type thing, where we take all these leftover bikes that have been lost at Grant, and they’re sitting in a room somewhere in Grant, and we would take these bikes and set up a shop where people could potentially check out bikes like a library, and then maybe students could work there and fix up the bikes and maybe get paid a little bit or just do it for experience. But that was one idea that some of my club members proposed as an idea.

Miller: Are there other competing ideas right now?

Peloquin: Oh, we have so many ideas.

Miller: What are some others?

Peloquin: We have a children’s book that we threw out recently. The thought was to create something that would inspire a younger generation to create eco clubs or climate justice clubs at the high school level. And we thought it would be more of a fiction story with student art involved. But the idea was that it would kind of be a true story, because it is a story that a lot of high schoolers go through, looking for a club, finding a place, and creating their own space in the movement.

Miller: Eesa, what about you? What ideas have come forward from you or other students and Ida B. Wells?

Taylor: There’s no solid plans for projects right now. But what I’m starting off with is just getting the club up and running, hopefully getting enough people so we can actually get projects going. We are working with a nonprofit right now. I think it’ll make it a lot easier to provide volunteer opportunities and organized projects.

Miller: And Ari, what’s the process going to be like for choosing these projects, and who’s going to be doing that?

Ettinger: We’ve been having conversations with the staff at the Portland Clean Energy Fund about that question and others. I think the biggest thing that we started with was we would prefer to not really ever have to say no to student project ideas. So one thing we’ve been working on internally is this question of “how do we get to yes?” We’re hoping that within a school, if there’s multiple project ideas, principals will be involved, there’ll be a staff advisor who’s often going to be a teacher, but could be any staff member from within the school. And then they’ll work with some of the facilities and maintenance staff, or art professionals at PPS, people at the central office who can look over project proposals and have a back and forth with students, so that we can figure out a way to support whatever ideas are coming out, and get to that “yes.”

Miller: Petal, that does remind me of some stuff I saw on an overview document for how this is going to work that caught my attention. It explained that depending on the kind of project that students like you come up with, you’ll have to get in contact with different PPS departments. So the examples they gave were if you want to do some kind of water reduction project, you’d have to get in touch with energy folks, sustainability folks, plumbing folks, custodial departments. If you had some field trip idea, that would entail talking to the risk folks, transportation, sustainability. How much experience do you have navigating the district bureaucracy?

Peloquin: Oh, gosh. I have a bit of experience, especially with last year, a big project was to start in-house composting for students at Grant, because all PPS district high schools have … like back of house, their kitchen staff will compost everything. But there was never that opportunity for students to take. So I had to navigate the bureaucracy in a way. I would talk to custodial staff, and then we had to get the principal’s approval first, and then different types of people from different groups would come. We got meeting spaces. And it was kind of tricky, but there’s so much support anywhere. Every time I ask for support, people were like “Oh, I have an idea, I know how to help you. I can help.” Generally, they trusted me with this idea of composting, and they were there to help as long as I was there to ask the right questions or ask the right people or figure it out.

Miller: That is encouraging, I have to say. Ari, what do you most hope that students are going to learn from this? We are talking about a school after all.

Ettinger: Yeah, absolutely. Portland Public Schools, and I think most school districts are always striving to create opportunities for project-based learning. And obviously, this is a great opportunity for that. We know that through project-based learning, students are getting a lot of leadership skills, they’re learning real life skills about how to manage these. And we’ve actually put together a sort of a project management tool kit for students to use, to kind of run them through some of those tricky things they’re going to run into that they might not be used to. So it’s going to be an amazing learning opportunity in some hard skill areas.

But I think the other thing is that we’ve heard from students over and over again that the best thing that they can do to combat the kind of gloom that comes with climate change is to feel like they are taking meaningful, real life action. And so I think from a personal learning standpoint, what it means to have an issue that might feel overwhelming and to learn that perhaps the best way to address that in your own life is to take action and be supported in taking that action, I think is a pretty invaluable learning experience in its own right.

Miller: And just briefly as I mentioned at the beginning, this is just one piece of a much larger pot of money that Portland schools are going to be getting from the city for climate projects over the next five years. What will the PPS district do with the other 17 million?

Ettinger: We’re still collaborating with PAT, the Portland Association of Teachers, to finalize how we’re going to spend that additional pot of money. We know it’s going to go toward building improvements around energy efficiency, HVAC improvements – things that are going to really increase the thermal comfort of our buildings. And then on top of that, we might have some funds available from that pot for schoolyard improvements that we really hope are going to address some of the shade equity issues in the city of Portland, and increase opportunities for outdoor learning for students, and that additional way of connecting to the outdoors and to climate.

Miller: And hopefully make it more likely that schools can stay open even if it’s 95 degrees.

Ettinger: That is the hope, absolutely.

Miller: Ari Ettinger, Eesa Taylor and Petal Peloquin, thanks so much.

Ettinger: Thank you. It was a pleasure.

Taylor: Thank you.

Peloquin: Thank you.

Miller: Eesa Taylor is a junior at Ida B. Wells High School. Petal Peloquin is a senior at Grant High School. And Ari Ettinger is the Portland Public Schools climate resiliency program manager.

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