From reducing plastic waste to rethinking the way we grow our food, this blog brings together powerful stories of individuals and communities who are making sustainability a way of life. Featuring the impactful work of Melton Fellows and our affiliates, it spotlights initiatives that span circular economies, eco-entrepreneurship, waste segregation, nature conservation, climate-smart farming, and more. These projects showcase practical, community-rooted solutions that address some of our planet’s most urgent environmental challenges, proving that global change begins with local action.

Promoting Organic Farming

Akshay took a group of around 30 students to the ERA Organic State centre in Bangalore to meet with the founder of the Green Path Eco Hotels, Dr. Jayaram H. R.. The students spoke to him about the benefits of organic foods and its drawbacks and challenges. The session was followed by a trip to the Sukrushi organic farm to observe the practices in use and to continue the goal of sustainability through a reforestation drive. The group planted 60 saplings in total of various varieties. The outcome of this project was an immersive learning experience that deepened students’ understanding of organic farming and sustainability, culminating in a hands-on reforestation drive where 60 diverse saplings were planted.

Ditch the Plastic Bottle at Ashesi!

Tito challenged the Ashesi University community to consume tap water, convincing them that the tap water available on campus is just as safe as bottled water. He put up challenge sheets on campus for the community to pledge to try tap and dispenser water for 24 hours. “Plastic waste production is not a company or industry problem. Instead, it is a people problem. Our individual use and disposal of the same create the huge mess we see around us,” Tito says.  The outcome of this project was a shift in perception within the Ashesi University community, encouraging individuals to reduce plastic waste by choosing tap and dispenser water over bottled alternatives.

Promoting Sustainability / Changing Lifestyles

David held a workshop at Friedrich Schiller University composed of eight students from Asia, Africa and Europe. Participants were led into conversations about environmental sustainability, which culminated in ideas about future actions such as social media awareness, conscious shopping via sustainable options, and reduction in the amount of resources used in their daily lives. The outcome of this project was the cultivation of cross-cultural dialogue on environmental sustainability, empowering participants to commit to future actions like conscious consumption, resource reduction, and awareness-building through social media.

Sustainable Living on Campus

To remind students of some little actions they could take to live more sustainable lives on Ashesi’s Campus, Nana Kwame engaged students on campus around a sustainable living recommendations infographic he created. “I want the world to know that living more sustainable lives does not necessarily mean taking monumental leaps in self-deprivation,” Nana said. “Rather, taking little actions and correcting little unsustainable behaviors can aggregate to create monumental changes.” The project successfully raised awareness among students about simple, actionable steps for sustainable living. This was achieved through the use of an engaging infographic and meaningful one-on-one interactions across the campus, encouraging students to adopt practical changes in their daily lives.

Reducing Consumption Through Upcycled Gifts Christmas

Charlotte challenged friends and family not to buy Christmas presents, but rather to recycle or “upcycle” gifts. She wanted to remind people that they can reuse ‘old’ things or transform them into something new. In an effort to reduce consumption, she encouraged friends to buy as little as possible and find inspiration for gifts in the things they already have. The outcome of this project was a heightened awareness among Charlotte’s friends and family about sustainable gift-giving, encouraging reduced consumption through recycling and upcycling during the holiday season.

Encouraging Local Community To Recycle

Joaquin wanted to encourage people in Temuco, Chile to classify their home waste and take it to recycling points. He passed out 50 self-made flyers door to door in his neighborhood, and when possible give a little talk about recycling to encourage people to commit themselves to waste management and recycling. The outcome of this project was increased community awareness and engagement in household waste segregation and recycling, driven by direct outreach and the distribution of 50 informative flyers.

Creating Awareness Of Sanitation And Community Health

Melton Fellow Pearl wanted to inspire students in Mallam-Accra, Ghana to help keep their community clean. She distributed posters about sanitation to classes at a primary school. A talk was also given to create awareness of sanitation and how they can individually better the sanitary conditions of their school and community as a whole. The outcome of this project was increased awareness among primary school students in Mallam-Accra about the importance of sanitation, motivating them to take individual responsibility for maintaining cleaner school and community environments.

Gardening to Shape the Public Sphere

Fellows from Jena (Germany) wanted to build awareness for possibilities to garden in urban spaces. They created an open space for planting one’s own herbs and flowers, and prepared and distributed seed balls to spread them in the city of Jena. They feel that such activities empower citizens to shape the public sphere by integrating green spaces within urban areas. The outcome of this project was enhanced community awareness and engagement in urban gardening, empowering citizens to contribute to greener public spaces through hands-on activities like planting and seed ball distribution.

All I want for Christmas is a Recycled Handmade Gift

Melton Fellow Alexandra Kruppa set an example for a more sustainable way to celebrate Christmas by offering a workshop on creating recycled handmade gifts. Christmas has increasingly become an excuse for massive consumption, resource depletion, and waste, and Alexandra wanted to raise awareness about more conscious alternatives.

Using donated leftovers from a hardware store, materials that would otherwise go to waste, she engaged eight participants in crafting unique gifts. The workshop achieved two key goals: raising awareness among hardware workers, participants, and gift recipients about the environmental and social impact of holiday consumption, and inspiring creativity as participants exchanged ideas and collaboratively crafted meaningful gifts.

Sustainable Menstruation

Waste management is a universal problem. Sustainable menstruation is even more difficult to talk about because of the taboo around the topic, which is again a global issue. In India, The result of unsustainable menstrual practices is visible in the plight of the waste collectors who have to deal with the sanitary waste. Also the large amounts of untreated waste that end up in garbage dumps and landfills.

Vinita shared, “I am passionate about both sustainability and gender parity. This issue lies at the intersection of both of these topics. Some other students and I, We had a discussion rather than a session involving just one person speaking and the others listening. This made everyone present comfortable and hence able to express their views freely without fear of criticism. I want to raise awareness about this issue, since just one person making a change of such kind in their life is not enough to create as large an impact as involving the community will have.”

Addressing Poor Plastic Waste Management

Plastic waste management is a big issue all over the world. People are currently working to find better ways to handle plastic waste. In Ghana and other parts of the world a good chunk of the plastic waste ends up in water bodies like rivers, lakes and oceans; thereby posing danger to aquatic life. In other cases, the plastics are burnt and they release toxic compounds which have an adverse impact on the global climate.

Major shared that he has always lived in places where people practiced poor plastic management, but the extent of the problem in Ghana was overwhelming. There are empty plastic water bottles, sachets and plastic bags littering almost all parts of the capital, Accra. Apparently, the supply of plastics does not seem to be dying out since they are produced locally. This only means that he will be seeing more and more plastic waste mismanagement if he did not try and take action against it. He added, “I am an Engineering student. The main reason why I chose this career path is because I want to solve problems through design and making skills. Major engaged the Berekuso, Ayim and Bola communities in, Accra, Ghana in a clean-up activity and led awareness raising sessions.”

He describes his act as follows: “In Berekuso and Ayim we had direct contact with the village leaders and teachers. These people helped us to organize the people and students that we were targeting. I worked with the African Transformers in Ayim and we taught the pupils in the local school craft skills using plastic waste. On the Borla Beach clean-up I partnered with Ahote, African Transformers and the Ashesi Leo Club. In all, 55 people took part in the Borla Beach clean-up activity. The participants included students from Ashesi University, 45 of which were members of the Ashesi Leo club and others from the African Transformers and the Ahote Sanitation Project. On the day, a number of children who were playing at the beach joined us in the clean-up activity.” 

Sanitation and Water Purity Awareness

There are a lot of congested settlements in Bangalore where there are a lot of poor people living in poor conditions. This is reflected in a lack of resources, mainly clean water supply because there is usually a single tap for an entire settlement which can be used only for a few hours a day. The 6th Sustainable Development Goal is ensuring availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.  Smaran, who decided to tie his Act of Global Citizenship to SDG 6, shared, “My passion has always been sustainability in communities and I have always held a strong belief that people, especially children in India lack the right education and awareness at the grassroots level about water purity and water borne diseases. Doing my act helped me educate these children on precautions they can take and maybe even pass on in their community.”

Smaran collaborated with the local Rotaract to be a part of their program “I-Teach”. He added, “iTeach involves students  volunteering to go to local municipal schools to teach children basic academic subjects. I decided to facilitate my act as one of their sessions which also provided an extra-curricular learning experience for the children, and asked a few volunteers to join me. We taught batches of students of 8 to 10 children as the classrooms were not suited for a bigger volume of students. The school has now decided to have “health and hygiene” taught to students as a part of their curriculum on a permanent basis.” The outcome of this project was increased awareness among children in under-resourced communities about water purity and hygiene practices, leading to long-term impact as the municipal school integrated “health and hygiene” into its permanent curriculum.

Climate change and Araucaria

Patricio Díaz Sandoval built his Act of Global Citizenship around climate change, primarily addressing the death of the araucaria, a thousand-year-old tree from southern America. The death of this tree species is directly related to the increase in temperature due to climate change, as well as to other factors such as forest fires, drought, deforestation and the commercialization of its seeds. 

Patricio worked with the girls in children’s home of the “To Love” Foundation, to raise awareness and take action on this issue. He added, “I structured my global act in three steps

1. INFORMATION: Contextualization phase through a brief talk about the relationship between the effects of climate change in Araucaria.
2. SYNTHESIS: Reflection phase where the girls brainstormed what they can do to take care of the Araucaria and other trees.
3. ACTION: Practical phase in which we carry out a workshop with recycled materials, such as pants and juice boxes. Creating cases, wallets, and gloves, in this way we put into practice what we have learned.” 

​The big problems are almost always multifactorial, and when this happens it is a good opportunity to contextualize the “action phase” to a problem that is related to the community, so in this way that will be significant learning, which also improves the participation of the community during the global act.  

Addressing lack of awareness in Waste Segregation

In his hometown village, Taizhou, Zhejiang, Cashion carried out his Act of Global Citizenship with the focus being Waste sorting and segregation. Cashion shared, “The 10 families I picked have gradually started to waste sorting and, though not in a very high quality, it is already a good beginning. I contacted the cleaner to take away the classified waste for their convenience in return. And I’ve told the village head about it and maybe he will make it under way soon. In my home city the economy is quite well developed, so I think environmental protection should also follow up. Now some changes have taken place and are moving towards a better direction. So I hope what I did can make even a bit contributions to the community and let the government’s campaign move on faster and more smoothly.” Cashion added that he used Questionnaire Survey, ofStorytelling, System Thinking as important tools to successfully carry out his Act. The outcome of this project was the initiation of waste sorting practices among 10 families in Taizhou, fostering grassroots environmental responsibility and prompting interest from local leadership to potentially scale the effort across the village.

Clean up of waste blackspots

Waste management in developing countries especially is a huge concern and there is growing need to take proper steps to implement methods to deal with safe disposal of garbage. Often times, due to improper waste disposal, people get diseases and places are deemed inhabitable. Orohalli is a village around 40 kms from Bangalore city, coming under what is termed as “Bangalore Rural”. The major occupation of people living there is agriculture. This is acute lack of awareness about wet/dry waste segregation amongst them and there is no waste disposal system in place. Sanchita gathered a few friends, went to this village and spoke to some of the villagers about the importance of waste segregation and proper waste disposal. They then cleaned up two areas in the village where garbage was being dumped for months. Seeing the outcome, the villagers were also motivated to implement cleaner methods of disposal and vowed to segregate their waste.

Sanchita shared, “Environment protection/climate change is something I have always been passionate about. Waste disposal and cleaning is not something I had given much thought to, but after recently coming across an article that highlighted how most of our waste is disposed in water bodies like oceans and landfills on the outskirts of cities, I wanted to do something about the issue. We first went door-to-door campaigning, where we explained to the villagers about the concept of waste segregation and its importance. We told them our objective of helping them keep their village clean, which they were happy about and hence helped in directing us to the spots that needed cleaning. We conducted Awareness drive coupled with clean up of two garbage disposal sites, so that villagers could practically see the benefits of cleaner surroundings, themselves. Armed with rubber gloves, masks and huge bags to collect trash, we set out to clean up the sites ourselves, regardless of the stigma attached to garbage within the village. The 15 villagers who were impressed by the clean up drive, vowed to take this knowledge to the rest of the village, to ensure every house implements a waste segregation scheme.

Home Gardening Against Climate Change!

Paritosh organized a viewing party of “24 Hours of Climate Reality” alongside a small workshop to encourage people to grow a portion of their own food, reducing reliance on large supply chains. The workshop introduced beneficial plants for home gardening and shared sources for simple supplies. “Home gardening is the first step to reduce our dependence on the global supply chain. This can help us reduce farming waste and distribute the load on the land. It is also the best way for us to know the source of our food,” he said. The outcome of this project was increased awareness of climate issues and a growing interest in home gardening, encouraging participants to take small but impactful steps toward food sustainability and reduced dependence on large supply chains.

Designing Healthy Eating Experiences

Aobo worked with a design team at the University of Pennsylvania to design a special leaf-shaped plate that encourages kids to select multiple dishes rather than single, and with appropriate portions. The team worked with the cooking team at Comegys Elementary School in West Philadelphia to produce healthy, balanced meals to be served in the plates. The final plate and accompanying branding scheme will achieve the project goal of working with a younger generation of community members to promote healthy eating in the community.

Farming for a Better Future: Blessed Tofara Chidhoni’s Work in Sustainable Agriculture

Melton Fellow Blessed Tofara Chidhoni is making a tangible impact in the fight against poverty (SDG 1) and hunger (SDG 2) through an innovative farming initiative designed to improve livelihoods and promote sustainable agriculture.

In collaboration with CVFLI (Community Vegetable Farming for Livelihood Improvement), Blessed has successfully constructed a water reservoir with the help of youth farmers, ensuring access to water for irrigation and boosting agricultural productivity. The project also prioritizes climate resilience, integrating adaptive farming techniques that respond to shifting environmental conditions.

Beyond infrastructure, CVFLI focuses on connecting farmers with value chains, strengthening farm-to-farm networks, and helping them access markets to increase their incomes and enhance their quality of life.

By empowering local farmers and fostering sustainable food production, Blessed Tofara Chidhoni is driving real change, one harvest at a time.