Sara Laimon
Michael Fields Agricultural Institute- East Troy, WI
Sara Laimon
Environmental Charter High School Green Ambassador Founder
Alumni, Michael Fields Agricultural Institute
sara_laimon@echsonline.org
www.greenambassadors.org
www.echsonline.org
Africa is where my story begins as well as the stories of our ancestors. All human DNA can be traced back to a small village in the middle Africa according to preeminent anthropologist, Richard Leakey. And in this Cradle of Civilization is where I began my advocacy for sustainable living in order to honor our ancestors by keeping our Earth and its species alive.
When I was 20 years old, I traveled from Wisconsin to Zimbabwe to build and manage a dairy farm. There, I was hit with an ominous epiphany - if the rest of the world modeled the U.S. in the way it consumed natural resources, eventually we’d no longer have a planet. After all, the United States has only five percent of the world’s population, but uses more than 25 percent of the Earth’s natural resources.
I left Africa and knew my next mission was to teach people the consequences of our wasteful practices and how our actions affect our planet. I received my Biology and secondary education degree from Alverno College, interned with Michael Fields Agriculture Institute and became a Nationally Board Certified teacher at Environmental Charter High School.
Teaching biology was wonderful, but I had a gnawing feeling that I had to do more. To create real change, I needed to build something larger than myself . . . something larger than the sum of its parts - I needed to educate young people about sustainability so they could incorporate this knowledge into their own lives once they left school and entered adulthood. And with this knowledge comes a great responsibility to teach others about this new paradigm shift called green living. That’s why I began the Green Ambassadors program. I hope that this program will help re-create education, schools, and communities as we know it!
The Green Ambassadors is an organization targeting youth to go out in the world and make a change to help the planet. The Green Ambassador program gives students the information and opportunities to go and spread their solutions to Earths problems. The Green Ambassadors give youth the opportunity to get their voices heard.
Michael Fields Agricultural Institute is a public, non-profit institute for education and research in sustainable agriculture, which admits students of any race, color and national or ethnic origin.