Description
Ecology and People Fall 2021Report 1 Assignment PromptFor your Community Engagement Project, you will be working with one of the three Community Partner Organizations available for volunteering this semester in Ecology and People: The Food Garden of the Institute of Sustainability, Heal the Bay or the California Seaweed Festival.
Heal the Bay has a great website for volunteers: https://healthebay.org/take-part/.
Look at the sections on Give Time, Give Voice and Marine Debris Tracking. You can use the Marine Debris Tracker App anywhere in California. You dont have to be on an LA County Beach.For your Report, you will research an aspect of the work of the community organization and write a well-supported essay on that topic including how you plan to contribute to the organizations mission and how you can use what you are learning in the course in that contribution. Your Report should be 800 to 1000 words in length. You must use reliable sources including peer-reviewed sources like those you found using the University Library in Week 2 of the semester. Illustrate your Report with pictures or diagrams that inform the text. The illustrations must be mentioned in the text of the Report and have informative captions that include the source of the image. You will have the opportunity to revise your Report and resubmit it. The higher of the 2 scores is the one that will be used for the course grade. Your Report should include the following elements:
Introduction
Briefly describe the Community Partner Organizations mission. What are they trying to do? What problem does their work solve? Education is part of their mission. What information do they want to communicate and to whom? How can volunteers help fulfill their goals? How are you going to contribute to the mission of the organization you are going to work with? Your volunteer contributions will be unique. What to you bring to the organization in terms of skills, interests, location and or perspective?
The ecological issues you are learning about in this course are: population growth and density, invasive species, climate change, community dynamics, spread of diseases, fisheries, nutrient cycling / eutrophication, soil fertility, designing sustainable technology and environmental policy. The work of your Community Partner Organization overlaps with some or all of those challenges, directly or indirectly. Identify and elaborate on some (3-5) of those connections.Focus TopicResearch one aspect of your Community Partner Organizations work that interests you most. It does not have to be exactly the work you will be doing for the project. Any topic related to the mission of the organization is great. Choose something that you want to know more about. Explore that topic using the resources available to you in the University Library, summarize what is known and what the greatest challenges are in that area. Use at least 5 reliable sources of information to support your writing (at least 2 of them must be peer reviewed sources). Do not use direct quotations from them but paraphrase what you learn from those sources. VisionWhat is the outlook for the future of your chosen focus topic? How are the challenges you described above likely to be resolved? What would you consider the ideal outcome?
