Dadit Hidayat*, Randy Stoecker**, and Heather Gates***
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Environmental sustainability is a topic of discussion across the globe. But getting people to act collectively on environmental sustainability, especially in local communities, is fraught with challenges. Sociologically, the challenge is one of understanding how collective action works in order to mobilize community members around environmental issues. An important sociological aspect of mobilizing people for collective action is framing those issues effectively (see Benford and Snow, 2000). Frames are toolboxes of interpretation that help us make sense of the world. We have frames of not just what is right and wrong, but even about what does or does not exist. For example, people have various frames of what “sustainable” is. One person might interpret ethanol as sustainable, comparing it to fossil fuels, while another might interpret it as unsustainable based on an analysis of the energy required to grow and transform the corn into ethanol. Activists weigh into these controversies, attempting to bridge their frames with community members’ frames or transform community members’ frames to fit with the activists’ frames.
Continue reading Promoting Community Environmental Sustainability Using a Project-Based Approach
Last Thursday in our community-based research (CBR) class, we reviewed a recruitment email that needed to be sent to our research subjects. At one point I thought, let’s just use this version and move forward. But students were starting to offer inputs share discomfort with the original email version. Feeling the energy from students in improving the email, I then asked, “do you want to split and work in two smaller groups so that we can work on two different tasks, or do you want to stay in a bigger group and work on this email together?” Students anonymously indicated their desire to stay together, and I agree. Consequently, I had to delay offering a training on how to create an encryption folder with a 
