Millennials lead IDEAS for change
On a recent Wednesday night, dozens of people fill an Audubon Park meeting hall, serving vegetarian lasagna and inspiration. Mostly millennials with a sprinkling of baby boomers, the crowd spent nearly three hours tackling topics from food waste to fracking with one overriding rule: No whining. This gathering is about finding solutions.
It’s called the Orlando Hive, and it’s the creation of one of the most influential nonprofit organizations most people have never heard of, IDEAS For Us.
“We’re part of a generation that has heard environmental bad news our entire lives,” says CEO Clayton Louis Ferrara, 30, the organization’s lone paid staff member among a legion of passionate volunteers. “Empowerment is critical. If you don’t give people a way to act on what they
learn, it becomes a poison.”
So four years ago, IDEAS — Intellectual Decisions on Environmental Awareness Solutions — began holding these monthly “think-and-do tanks” to crowd-source suggestions for action. The group has created environmental awareness campaigns, carried out clean-up projects for lakes and rivers and bolstered recycling programs. Perhaps its biggest accomplishment was orchestrating an urban gardening program called fleet farming that uses bicyclecommuting volunteers to convert individual homeowners’ lawns into fertile beds of kale, turnips, sweet potatoes and the like. The program has attracted national media attention — and a waiting list of residents who want to offer up their yards.
“It’s pretty amazing to witness,” says Eric Rollings, 48, who chairs the Orange Soil and Water Conservation District and a Hive regular for three years. “Especially with what’s happening now in the federal government — when there are all these disheartening, overwhelming things going on — I can go to the Hive and find sanctuary and hope. You feel like you’re part of the solution.”
The Hive is the most visible work of IDEAS, but it’s only a small part of the story.
Launched by then-student Chris Castro in a University of Central Florida dorm room in 2008, what began as a campus club to push for energy conservation and recycling is now a registered nonprofit organization with a downtown Orlando headquarters and a global reach.
Certified by the United Nations in 2012, it has over 200 chapters and affiliates in high schools, universities and communities in 24 countries around the world and awards from the Vatican, Hewlett Packard, the Centers for American Progress and the White House Office of Public Engagement.
In recent years, Ferrara and Castro have traveled to Berlin, Brazil, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Liberia to nurture IDEAS chapters and offer resources and expertise in stemming climate change, boosting food production and improving public health.
“During my trip to West Africa in 2014, we discovered women were disproportionately dying of heart disease and lung infections because they were cooking with charcoal briquettes in unventilated huts,” says Ferrara, a Rollins College graduate in biology and environmental science who began volunteering to help save sea turtles when he was 5. “What they were doing was digging a trench around an area of forest and burning everything to the ground — killing every plant, killing every animal — and then people would pick up chunks of charcoal to use for cooking rice. It was quite horrible.”
Ferrara and his African counterparts held Hive meetings to educate people on the impact of their methods and brainstorm ideas on how to change. Together, they built a communal kitchen outdoors — eliminating the health risk — and planted fast-growing trees that could be cut and used for cooking fuel, sparing the forest.
“IDEAS For Us taught me that people can turn their ideas into solutions through their own imagination, creativity [and] culture,” Stephen Lavalah, a nonprofit leader in Liberia, writes in an email. In 2013, Lavalah spent four months in Orlando working with the group and has continued to collaborate on projects that replant the forest, provide safe drinking water and support hand-washing and solid-waste disposal — efforts that have enlisted thousands of students in his country. “I learned that wisdom is better than strength, and our future is brighter and better through practical grassroots-led actions involving everyone.”
Castro, 28, now sustainability director for the city of Orlando — the secondyoungest person in the nation to hold such a position — says he never imagined the journey his little club might take. After all, on its first try, university officials rejected its application as a student organization, saying there were already enough campus environmental groups.
He and his supporters decided to meet anyway.
“It has exploded beyond our wildest dreams,” he says. “When Bill Clinton was here at UCF for the 50th anniversary commencement address, he spent over three minutes talking about our organization. … It was just incredible. I wasn’t even in the audience, but people are calling and texting me, saying: ‘Bill Clinton just namedropped you.’ ”
But these days, what the group needs more than recognition is funding. Scraping by on family foundation grants, corporate donors and individual $36 annual memberships, it still manages to offer $1,000 micro-grants to help people with environmental innovations get them off the ground. But the group wants to do more.
Ferrara, who came aboard full time a year ago, has just begun raising what he and Castro hope will be $5 million over the next five years — enough to create an endowment that would bankroll its grants and operations — and keep it from red-lining every few months.
“We really believe we’re at a critical time in human history,” Ferrara says.
“If what is happening in this country isn’t enough to spur you to action, what the hell will?”