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UNO Service Learning Project Featured in National Geographic

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With the help of Omaha Northwest High School, Steve Rodie (pictured) is inspiring local schools and businesses to create their own rain gardens.

A collaborative project between UNO students and Omaha Northwest High School was recently featured in National Geographic as a “Next Generation Environment Leaders Project.”

Last fall UNO students taking Professor Steve Rodie’s Landscape Appreciation and Environmental Sustainability course and Omaha Northwest students in Ms. Rachael Burns' Horticulture class collaboratively surveyed, calculated and designed a rain garden for the high school.

The rain garden, installed in the spring of 2016, will not only increase sustainable solutions to storm water runoff, but also serve as a means of continuing environmental education.

The partnership is part of the UNO P-16 Initiative. As part of UNO’s Service Learning Academy, the P-16 Initiative facilitates partnerships between three key groups:

- UNO students and their teachers

- Preschool-through-high school students and their teachers

- Community organizations and their members

Through these service-learning partnerships, P-16 brings the classroom into the community through application of education to find solutions to real-life problems.

Read the full article here.