About Green Silicon Valley
Green Silicon (GSV) Valley is a nonprofit organization founded and led by Wilcox High School students Ayush Garg, Dev Shah and Abhi Tenneti that aims to make environmental education more accessible and personal, while also training future climate leaders on climate education. GSV seeks to realize its mission by creating hands-on kits for elementary and middle schoolers to learn about climate phenomena and solutions, and sending high school students to present classes and sessions. Through this process, they are able to spread climate education to younger generations, while also helping high school students learn how to communicate about climate issues. This helps prepare future generations of climate leaders, as well as instilling an early understanding of the importance of climate work.
According to co-founder Ayush Garg, the project arose from the business club when Garg, Shah, and Tenneti were awarded a $5,000 grant from Silicon Valley Power which allowed them to conduct six presentations at Peterson Middle School (Green Energy Futures). Each presentation includes hands-on activities such as building wind turbine models, creating water filtration systems, and running erosion experiments to help depict different climate topics. According to GSV, they have managed to reach 680 students so far across 12 partner schools in 4 different countries (Green Silicon Valley). Shah says that GSV is seeking to expand its reach to more high school chapters and partner elementary schools across the Bay Area.
As GSV grows, it will likely run into issues with obtaining sufficient funding to carry out its goals. According to Shah, “It's gonna be a lot harder to fund international and national presentations. That's definitely the hardest part right now, where we have the volunteers, we have the teachers, we have the students, but we just need the funding for the kids.” Further, the project has run into some issues making its way into classrooms, with conflicting schedules and curriculum. GSV is accepting donations, volunteer and intern applicants, and presentation requests in order to continue expanding.
About our guest
Dev Shah is a co-founder of Green Silicon Valley, alongside Ayush Garg and Abhi Tenneti. He is a student at Adrian Wilcox High School in Santa Clara, California.
Resources
For a transcript of this episode, please visit climatebreak.org/green-silicon-valley/
