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Bard College and the University of Waterloo teamed up to win a Swift Grant award from Lever for Change. With this support, the two universities will expand their online Worldwide Teach-In on Climate and Justice in March to engage students and faculty members from all disciplines in countries in Africa. The collaborative project aims to reach more than a million students from all over the globe to learn about climate change, climate solutions, and climate justice. 

The Worldwide Teach-In is a project of the Graduate Programs in Sustainability at Bard College in conjunction with partners worldwide and the Open Society University Network’s Solve Climate by 2030 Project. For the past three years, OSUN’s Solve Climate by 2030 has been supporting globally coordinated education about the climate crisis. The project has engaged hundreds of colleges, universities and high schools– from Malaysia to Minnesota, and from Austria to Alabama– in discussions of climate solutions, across the curriculum. Targeting participation by a million students across the planet, the Worldwide Teach-in on Climate and Justice event on March 30, 2022 is perhaps the most ambitious component of the project yet, advancing a three-hour teach-in model that maximizes student involvement through faculty leadership. 

“As educators, there is nothing more important than engaging students across our campuses in this extraordinary moment in which we are living,” says Eban Goodstein, director of Bard Center for Environmental Policy and director/faculty of Bard's Graduate Programs in Sustainability. 

Lever for Change is a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation affiliate, whose mission is to unlock significant philanthropic capital and accelerate social change around the world’s most pressing challenges. In May 2021, Lever for Change introduced the Swift Grants fund, aimed to provide small grants to Bold Solutions Network members for collaborative projects. This fund provided an outlet for the world’s top problem solvers to leverage expertise and join forces to find creative solutions in their fields.

Lever for Change received proposals for innovative, collaborative projects addressing climate, health, and refugee support. In total, they selected five projects. Over the next year, each team will use their $25,000 Swift Grants to implement their respective projects.