The upcoming days will feature events for Earth Week planned by the Phillips Academy Sustainability Coalition (PASC) since Winter Term. This “week” stretches from April 18 to May 3, and includes a diverse array of events from a Youth Climate Summit to Earth Festival.
This year’s Earth Week has expanded compared to previous years, with hopes that the large variety of events will cater to the entire student body. Ella Kowal ’25, Co-Coordinator of the PASC, shared the PASC’s goal for every student to find an interesting and engaging event.
“This is definitely one of the more ambitious Earth Weeks we’ve planned. The goal with that is we wanted to have a large variety of events that every person could find affinity with in some way. So, for more outdoorsy people, we have those events. For people interested in climate economics, we have those events. We really just try to have a huge breadth and depth of topics that we’re covering. Our summit specifically is focused on youth activism and finding hope. I would say that’s the overarching goal for this Earth Week, but we really try to touch on everything we can,” said Kowal.
Kowal spoke on what the planning process included, and how it progressed through the Winter and Spring Terms. She explained how the planning started with creating a list of potential ideas, which was then narrowed down to form a list of tangible events and finalized with specific details.
“We started Earth Week Planning near the end of Winter Term. There weren’t very regular meetings to start with, but we tried to start meeting about once a week. It has been difficult with all the schedule changes recently to keep up that consistent time. At the beginning we had brainstorming sessions where everyone just says what kind of events they’d like to see. We would write down a huge list, and as the meetings continue we trim down that list, figure out what’s actually feasible, then try to come up with times and dates for each of the events,” said Kowal.
Lisa de Boer ’26, one of the students involved in planning Earth Week events, highlighted that the planning process was open to anyone who was passionate in the initiative. Weekly planning meetings were all facilitated by Lowers who showed interest, and projects were led by whomever dedicated the most time into it.
“The PASC has been really good about involving lowerclassmen. One thing they did is every planning meeting has been facilitated by a Lower, and it has been a different Lower every meeting. We got a lot of underclassmen participation from that. [When brainstorming,] we split into groups to actually do those events, and we had maybe one or two people who were leading each project. At that stage, it was whoever was more passionate about the project. Whoever spent most time on it became the leader,” said de Boer.
Sophia Lazar ’26, another student working on Earth Week events, talked about the challenges of keeping track of all the factors of the planning. This included communicating with adults in the community, as well as ensuring that materials and students involved were all prepared for their respective events.
“Since we have a lot of goals and so many different events, it’s kind of hard to keep track of everything, and make sure that everything is getting done, as well as communicating effectively with administrators and faculty members so we can make sure we can get the necessarily materials on time and the responses from each of our performance groups [for the Earth Festival]. It has been a bit of a challenge but we’ve been handling it pretty well,” said Lazar.
Tina Zeng ’24, Co-Coordinator of the PASC, pointed out the PASC’s relatively short history, and how it has continued to increase its reach and initiatives to cater to as many people as possible. She emphasized that Earth Week was one way in which the PASC’s growth is shown, through the expansion of the activities list, and inclusivity for any student to join the cause.
“A lot of people don’t know this but the PASC is actually super young. It’s about a four or five year old club. It’s really been not that long, and we’re continuing to grow and improve and change every year as we sort of have more people interested and different interests within the branches of the PASC. Earth Week is a really good example of how that manifests, because each year we are trying to do different things and take different approaches to make it a more open and transparent process to sort of expand our activities lists. In some cases rather than expand quantity, [we] sort of deepen the quality,” said Zeng.
