Rushing down a high school hallway between classes, a Grade 9 student pauses at a fountain to refill his water bottle.

From the doorway of her classroom, Cynthia Roberts smiles.

The Midland, Michigan, math teacher has spent the last two years tackling H.H. Dow High School’s environmental impact. “I want to inspire people to be environmental stewards, or show them that one little action at a time can make a big difference,” says Roberts, who runs the school’s GO GREEN club.

Roberts has been a special-education math teacher for 40 years. Her love of problem solving is what drew her to the WE Schools WE Are Innovators (WAI) campaign. Made possible by Dow, the campaign encourages youth to use STEM skills to create innovative and inclusive solutions to the world’s most pressing issues.

She finds comfort in mathematics because, though there is usually only one right answer to a problem, “there’s still a creative aspect,” Roberts says. ”Sometimes there are 12 different ways to get that answer.” For this reason, the educator sees STEM not as a collection of classes, but as a series of solutions to the world’s problems and a way of encouraging people to work together. Her definition of STEM is woven into the GO GREEN club’s message and goals.

Formed in September 2017, the club began when a group of students approached Roberts about restarting H.H. Dow High School’s defunct recycling program. Not long after its kickoff, though, the group discovered that the volume of waste produced by the 1,300+ students and staff was too much for their current system to handle. They needed to educate the school community about proper waste management to help encourage a reduce and reuse strategy.

Roberts began to look at her own actions, and encouraged her students to do the same, as they searched for solutions to better their wasteful ways by repurposing and recycling.

Through research into the WE Are Innovators campaign, the group learned about “circular economies.” Roberts is now a convert. “We’re so accustomed to produce, use, dispose,” she says. “In a circular economy you think about the stress consumerism is putting on the environment, depleting resources, and you think about how products can be reused rather than just disposed of.”

If a traditional economy is a line of “produce, use, dispose,” a circular economy is a ring: “produce, use, reuse.” It inspires consumers to think about a product’s entire life cycle, rather than just its singular, fleeting use to them. Roberts has been using this school of thought to inspire students, and the community, to think twice before they make a purchase, while also considering how they can breathe new life into a product once they’ve finished with it

This awareness-based approach to the global issue of consumption and waste saw the GO GREEN club win the WE Are Innovators Challenge in the spring of 2019. For their leadership, Roberts and a student helming the project with her, Madeleine Hong, were awarded with a ME to WE Trip to Kenya last summer.

An immersive volunteer experience, ME to WE Trips empower travelers to experience a new culture while working alongside community members on sustainable development projects.

Roberts eagerly attests to the impact of this unique form of travel. “The trip made the project more of a passion to me. We won’t let it go, no matter how many walls we run into,” says Roberts of her travels. “I realized that there’s a lot more to life than stuff. It’s not the things that makes you happy, it’s the experiences and the people you meet.”