The Green Schools Conference and Expo is just three months away, which means we are counting down the days until we get to recognize another exemplary group of Green Apple Day of Service Award winners.

These awards recognize outstanding K–12 sustainability projects that make measurable change on one or more of the three pillars of a green school: environmental impact, health and well-being, and environmental and sustainability literacy.

Here's what you need to know about eligibility for the 2020 awards:

1. All projects registered on greenapple.org and completed between March 16 and Dec. 31, 2019, will be eligible. If you completed a project this year but haven’t registered it yet, now is the time to create your project profile! Note that if your project will take place after Dec. 31, 2019, it will be in the running for the 2021 awards season.

2. Your greenapple.org project profile is your entry for award consideration. There is no separate nomination process. Just be sure to update the profile with photos and a description when your project is complete.

3. Winners will be chosen in three categories:

• Deep impact: Recognizing projects that demonstrate a depth of impact. The impact may be on students at the school, the surrounding community, the built or natural environment as demonstrated by data, and more.
• Broad engagement: Recognizing projects that demonstrate broad engagement. This may include students, families, the surrounding community or the wider public.
• Creative approach: Recognizing projects that have taken a particularly creative or entrepreneurial approach.

4. The award recipients will be announced during the award luncheon at the Green Schools Conference and Expo in Portland, Oregon.

In 2019, we honored projects from around the world that made progress on school sustainability through green career exploration, civic responsibility and communication, and community mobilization. Read more about their work and draw inspiration to plan a project in your own community.

Register your project to be eligible

If you haven’t yet decided what to do for your Green Apple Day of Service project this year, consider letting your students decide! Giving students autonomy allows them to act on their passion for sustainability in their own school and measure their impact. Additionally, with the global rise in youth climate activism, empowering students to use their voice to directly influence their community can be meaningful and easy with the right resources and support.

While some students will know exactly what issue they’d like to tackle, it may be helpful to provide some example projects they can work from. Here are our three favorite project ideas for students to take the lead:

1. Lead a cafeteria waste audit and reduction campaign.

Cafeteria waste reduction is a great place to start on sustainability issues, because it’s a central location where every student spends time each day. Help students set up an audit of the school’s food waste, measure a typical day’s worth of waste and identify ways to reduce the amount being sent to the landfill. Students can work with cafeteria staff to develop a new system for the cafeteria waste flow and educate others on using the new system. After a week has passed, schedule another audit to measure landfill waste and identify the items that are sorted incorrectly. Keep the initiative up all year by setting a waste reduction goal and communicating your progress to the rest of the school.

There are many resources to get students started on a cafeteria waste project. WWF's Food Waste Warrior Toolkit is a three-part lesson for every step of a food waste audit. If your students are interested in food donation, check out our Sharing the Table: A Roadmap to Reducing and Recovering Surplus Food in Schools.

2. Advocate for green cleaning policies.

School cleaning policies have major consequences; harsh chemicals can lead to an increase in asthma incidents and absences and are often harmful to the environment. Get a team together to review current policies, research alternatives and any possible expenses, and draft new green cleaning policies to bring to leadership at the school. Once the policies are approved, educate fellow staff and students on how they can contribute to keeping their school healthy and clean.

This green cleaning project idea has all the resources and steps you’ll need to help students get started. Additionally, our School Board Advocacy Toolkit will help you take the issue up with your school’s leadership and the district for an even bigger impact.

3. Create a map of the school’s sustainability initiatives.

Does your school have bike racks, recycling bins, compost bins and other easy-to-miss items and initiatives? Your students can get their peers and school staff involved by identifying all the ways they can contribute through a school map. Educate everyone on the proper use of each and hand out the maps for easy reference. You can even assign student roles, such as student ambassador and sustainability monitor.

For inspiration, check out Northeastern University’s similar project from this year. Krissy Govertson, a Ph.D. student, worked with a mapping expert and volunteers to update campus maps with sustainable initiative markers to improve the campus’ overall sustainability. Find guidance and resources for this project.

Register your Green Apple project

School is almost back in session—or some, it’s already here. And that means it’s time to think about what impact you want to make at your school with Green Apple Day of Service. Getting started early means you have plenty of time to plan and decide what your school needs the most. The options are limitless for what you can do, and we have all the resources and guidance for your project, from start to finish.

Here’s what you need to know for this year:

Projects can happen any time. Schools can choose the time of year and day that works best for them, or even split up their projects among multiple days throughout the year. For example, a school could set up a recycling and composting program in the fall, conduct a few waste audits in the winter and celebrate the success of the program in the spring. The most impactful projects are long-lasting, address a critical issue at the school and get students involved as much as possible, so we’re making sure that the timing is flexible for all projects.

You can win a Green Apple Award. All 2019 projects registered and completed between March 16 and December 31 will be eligible for the 2020 Green Apple Day of Service Awards. The award recipients will be announced on the stage at the Green Schools Conference and Expo in Portland, Oregon. We’ll be looking for projects that address a critical sustainability issue at the school, engage students and volunteers, and address at least one of the three pillars of a green school. Your project profile is your award entry, so be sure to update your profile with photos and details of the event and its impact.

Projects get a fundraising boost with a mini-grant through Donorschoose.org. We’re continuing to give projects $200 mini-grants this year! In order to qualify, your project needs to be located in the U.S., registered on greenapple.org, and linked to your DonorsChoose.org project ID number. For step-by-step instructions, visit our fundraising page. For projects looking for additional funds, or for those outside the U.S., check out our fundraising tips.

Don’t know yet what you want to do for this year’s project? Checkout our project ideas page for inspiration and guidance on successful projects.

Register your project now

This past school year’s Green Apple Day of Service program is officially a wrap. While the Center for Green Schools is busy planning next year’s projects, we want to celebrate all of your work to improve schools this year.

Making a difference for students and sustainability

We ramped up our impact by over 40% in the 2018–2019 school year, with 132,591 students and 51,525 volunteers participating. All the effort by project leaders and volunteers made a significant difference in learning environments around the world.

From projects that worked to improve a school’s energy efficiency to those that taught students to effectively communicate and demonstrate sustainability principles to their classmates and communities, every activity led to more efficient and healthy learning environments and to students living more in a more eco-friendly way.

Please share this with your community, and help us make an even bigger impact in the 2019–2020 school year.

Start planning your 2019/2020 Green Apple project

Honorees reflect global diversity of the green schools movement

ST. PAUL, Minn. – (April 8, 2019) – Today, the Center for Green Schools at the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) announced the recipients of its Green Apple Day of Service Awards, which recognizes outstanding K-12 sustainability service learning projects and leaders. The awards were presented at the Green Schools Conference and Expo taking place in St. Paul, Minnesota this week. This year’s global recipients include Guatemala Green Apple Day – ABC Project, Tilling the Common Ground in Connecticut, and Drop After Drop, Let’s Fill Up the Reservoir of Life in Italy.

“This year, it was important for us to showcase the diverse ways that Green Apple Day of Service is engaging students and empowering them to make a difference in their local communities,” said Anisa Heming, director, Center for Green Schools at USGBC. “Our winning projects represent individual leaders, business partners, and of course whole school communities. There is certainly no one way to teach sustainability or civic responsibility, and we are so inspired by how these project teams were able to get students to consider their local and global impact.”

In its second year, the Green Apple Day of Service Awards honored teams across the world that inspired their communities to cultivate a greater sense of environmental and social stewardship. New this year, the awards were categorized into three distinct categories: depth of student and community transformation (Deep Impact); creativity in application (Creative Approach); and scale of community engagement (Broad Engagement):

• Guatemala Green Apple Day - ABC Project (Guatemala City, Guatemala) – Deep Impact Project: The Guatemala Green Business Council, in partnership with the Luz Figueroa Guillén School of Guatemala City, introduced sustainability education and improved the school building’s infrastructure to enable more physical activity, better air quality and waste reduction. As a result, the Luz Figueroa Guillén School has become a model for other under-served public schools in Guatemala.

• Tilling the Common Ground (New Haven, Connecticut) – Creative Approach Project: A speed-networking event hosted by Common Ground, an environmental high school urban farm and education center. Students had the opportunity to engage one-on-one with sustainability professionals about their interests, encouraging career exploration through personal connection.

• Drop After Drop, Let’s Fill Up the Reservoir of Life! (Rome, Chieti and Pescara, Italy) – Broad Engagement Project: A series of projects led by students across Italy coordinated in collaboration with Su18Pescara and Green Building Council Italia. Each project incorporated a classroom learning opportunity and empowered students to engage communities through public presentations and events. Their model serves as a template for teaching environmental topics and exercising civic responsibility through real-world application.

Green Apple Day of Service celebrates the central role that schools play in preparing the next generation of global leaders. In the years since its founding, it has grown into an international movement of nearly a million volunteers in 80 countries. Last year alone, Green Apple projects impacted more than 189,000 students with the help of thousands of teachers and volunteers.

This year’s Green Apple Day of Service has seen many successes, with communities working together to positively affect schools and spread sustainability. Behind each impactful project is a leader coordinating and planning the ways to engage students and communities.

One of last year’s Green Apple Day of Service Award winners for project leader, Ibrahim Kronfol, has been an example of determination and success in leading change with students in the Middle East and India. Since Green Apple’s inception in 2012, Kronfol has worked tirelessly to spread awareness and positively change students’ behavior in India, Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan. In 2017, he led 77 volunteers to reach over 1,000 students. In 2018, his efforts were doubled, with over 200 volunteers working with 2,500 students.

We’re so impressed with his success that we asked Kronfol to share how he has positively affected students and communities:

How have your Green Apple Day of Service projects sparked other sustainability actions in communities?

Our projects have had significant impacts on the host schools and their communities. To widen outreach and spread our message, we target new schools each year, focusing on schools that would not have access to similar activities otherwise, such as schools serving underprivileged communities.

This collaboration with different schools each year has had far-reaching effects. We reach more teachers and see their commitment grow as they ask questions, take notes and give suggestions during our first meetings with them. Many schools from previous sustainability movement campaigns that we led have now started their own Green Apple Day projects. We’ve even inspired numerous schools to implement ongoing recycling programs. They are proof that we are making great strides toward a greener future.

Since you started in 2012, what types of projects have you found to be most impactful to student and school staff behavior?

To make an impact, context truly matters. For example, in 2015, Lebanon was plagued by a massive waste management problem that was affecting the entire country. So, we tailored our program accordingly: we capitalized on the elevated awareness and conducted extensive hands-on activities for a reduce-reuse-recycle campaign.

It had an incredibly significant impact, because we taught students how to tackle an issue they were personally suffering from. Generally, activities that allow students to both think and act are guaranteed to have notable impact. I’ve also found projects related to energy and water are usually favorites among students.

Do you have a favorite story of impact from working with schools and students?

As an environmental activist, there are several times I’ve been impressed by a student or a school. If I had to cite just one example, it would be a kick-off meeting we had with an orphanage in Beirut at the beginning of our recent sustainability movement project. After we decided to do a water audit activity for 30 students, the event coordinator told me she wanted to include students from five sister school orphanages as well.

Instead of having just one school benefit from the activity, this way, students from each school could participate so they could serve as ambassadors and lead the same activity in their schools. We even transformed the water audit activity into an inter-school competition in which teams competed to get accurate results and present their findings. With such initiative from the coordinator, we were able to have a much bigger impact than we hoped for.

What advice do you have for others for planning and implementing a successful project?

Always start your project with a briefing on sustainability. This could be a presentation or a story, but keep it simple, and keep your audience in mind. We’re dealing with young students, and they need to have fun to think and get inspired. Also, keep the student-to-volunteer ratio in the margins of 5 to 1, which will ensure that every student is able to engage, learn and ask questions. Finally, preparation is everything: make sure volunteers have rehearsed the presentations and activities beforehand, to make the most of your time with the students.

Register your own Green Apple Day of Service project

The past 10 months have been filled with impactful Green Apple Day of Service projects, and we’re already thinking about how to honor your work through the 2019 Green Apple Day of Service Awards. Last year’s winners were true leaders in the global volunteer movement, and though they’ll be hard to follow, we know our community continues to raise the bar.

To streamline the process, this year’s award winners will be selected from project pages registered on greenapple.org. Selections will be made in March, so when your project is completed, be sure your project page is a complete reflection of all your hard work.

Create a project page to enter.

• Your entry for an award is your greenapple.org project page. There is no separate nomination process, and you do not need to share any additional information. If you’ve registered your project on the website, you are already in the running!
• Make sure everything you want us to know is included on your project page. This includes your project description, participation numbers, details of project impact, photos and other visuals.
• All registered projects completed between April 4, 2018, and March 15, 2019, will be considered.

Winners will be chosen in three categories.

• Deep impact: Recognizing projects that demonstrate a depth of impact. The impact may be on students at the school, the surrounding community, the built or natural environment as demonstrated by data and more.
• Broad engagement: Recognizing projects that demonstrate broad engagement. This may include students, families, the surrounding community or the wider public.
• Creative approach: Recognizing projects that have taken a particularly creative or entrepreneurial approach.

We’ve loved seeing what you’ve been up to for your Green Apple Day of Service, and we look forward to recognizing a deserving group of winners on stage at the 2019 Green Schools Conference and Expo awards luncheon on April 8.

Register or update your Green Apple Day of Service project

USGBC communities across the country are off to a strong start with Green Apple Day of Service this school year. Here are how some of our local networks have been mobilizing to support greener schools where they are.

In partnership with Arkansas Interfaith Power and Light, USGBC volunteers took action on Energy Efficiency Day alongside green team students at Stephens Elementary School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Working together, 15 volunteers and 30 students assembled gift bags with energy-efficient items such as LED bulbs and socket sealers, to help neighbors reduce their energy consumption and lower utility bills. It is estimated that up to 300 students and their families will be impacted as a result of this effort. USGBC volunteers will return for a schoolwide event for Earth Day in the spring.

Green Apple Day of Service at Stephens Elementary.

At Pharr Elementary in Snellville, Georgia, 14 teachers, parents, students and USGBC volunteers came out to revitalize the school garden and prepare it to serve as a learning space. The volunteers cleared vines so that students will be able to pick the garden’s sweet potatoes as part of their lesson on George Washington Carver. They also cleared out the keyhole garden in preparation for winter planting, and cleared out growth under the tables so the students can use the outdoor classroom. All 654 students at the school will have access to the garden this year. The local USGBC community is looking forward to getting out in the dirt again and sharing more resources with the school.

Green Apple Day of Service at Pharr Elementary.

In Berkeley, California, 23 volunteers, including students and USGBC staff, came together for a community work day at Jefferson Elementary School. They painted the cafeteria, exterior walls and backboard with low-VOC paint, cleaned windows with Green Seal-certified products, and disposed of unused furniture.

Outdoors, they planted drought-tolerant or pollinator-friendly plants throughout the schoolyard and weeded the vegetable garden. As a result of this effort, 415 students at the school will be positively impacted this year. Jefferson Elementary is focused year-round onmaking strides toward its sustainability goals. Through participation in the Northern California green building mentorship program, they are using the Arc benchmarking platform to engage students on making improvements in reducing waste, enhancing energy efficiency and more.

Green Apple Day of Service at Jefferson Elementary.

If their creativity inspires you to organize your own project, check out the mini-grants we're offering to assist in your planning. We look forward to seeing what impact we can make together this school year.

See other projects happening this year