The Arts as Champions of Change in Our Schools

Ed. Note: Champions of Change is a weekly initiative to highlight Americans who are making an impact in their communities and helping our country rise to meet the many challenges of the 21st century.

I am honored to be a White House Champion of Change – I am both humbled and inspired by my fellow Arts Education Champions, who are all working with passion and persistence to improve the lives of children everyday across our country.  I applaud President Obama for taking a leadership role in acknowledging the power of the arts to transform communities, to improve education and to drive our economy.  I truly appreciated the opportunity to participate in a lively exchange of ideas with members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities and The Creative Coalition, and staff from the US Department of Education, the Arts Education Partnership, and Americans for the Arts during our recent round-table discussion.  

My work at CAPE – Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education – is rooted in the belief that the arts can play a leading role in transforming education, particularly for students who have been left behind by traditional schools. In fulfilling our  organization’s mission to increase student success through arts driven education, we have inspired change in different ways: 

Reducing Our Individual Carbon Footprints

Ed. Note: Champions of Change is a weekly initiative to highlight Americans who are making an impact in their communities and helping our country rise to meet the many challenges of the 21st century.

After witnessing some very innovative renewable energy projects in my travels around the world, I thought: why can't I implement these principles in our family business? We have always had a personal commitment to lower our energy consumption, and that commitment set us on a path that brought me to Washington D.C. for the Rural Champions of Change forum.

My wife Tara and I achieved our goal by effectively putting our vision into action. Our contractor Dixon Power and I came up with a plan to take the energy needs of our horse boarding and event facility towards a self-supporting operation via sustainable and renewable energy. We soon realized that the hurdles we faced would require help from the Federal government, State government, the local county, and our personal banking institution.

We are proud of the outcome, particularly being the first at this endeavor. The obstacles that we encountered in our project were outweighed against the threats posed by climate change, dependency on foreign oil, and the need to do the right thing for the community that we live in.

While we did this for our personal energy consumption, now we understand that if one person starts to make a change, it can lead the entire community benefiting. After visiting with the other Champions of Change nominees, I have a new found clarity coupled with a deeper understanding of the challenges that we all face in our personal quest to lower our overall energy consumption. My wife and I can actually now begin to imagine what we can do as a nation, being that just two individuals from a small rural community can take the lead by reducing our individual carbon footprints on our personal and professional energy consumption.

Bringing Practical Biomass Energy to Rural Communities

Ed. Note: Champions of Change is a weekly initiative to highlight Americans who are making an impact in their communities and helping our country rise to meet the many challenges of the 21st century.

The second generation of bioenergy crops has the potential to produce more energy on poorer soils and with fewer inputs than any crops we use for energy now. But turning this potential into practical, profitable crops may only come when farmers have had a chance to work with them.

Selecting the most promising crops from research conducted at the University of Illinois and drawing on the experience of the farmers we visited in Germany and Austria, we found that the economics and logistics of biomass production and its use on our farm and in our community looked very promising. The holdup is a “chicken or egg” situation. No farmer wants to plant a new crop without a market, and new markets won’t develop without a supply.

In Europe we also learned how even small amounts of biomass can be effectively used to replace oil, coal, and gas to heat homes, farm buildings, schools, and businesses. As supplies of biomass increase, power plants and even cellulosic ethanol plants can be considered; however, using locally produced biomass will, in most instances, prove to be beneficial to producers and end users alike, thus strengthening the community.

Billions of dollars (both private and public) are being spent to learn how to convert biomass to liquid fuels. Yet, unless we provide the incentive to establish biomass crops, we won’t have them when we need them. It would be akin to spending billions to research and build a new fighter jet and then realizing that we have no fuel to fly it.