Lead the Change

Who will be “The Greatest Generation”?  Consider the work facing the generation of college students and recent graduates today.

Over the twenty-first century, you will live through both deep recessions and economic booms, through wars and political upheavals. You will experience staggering technological breakthroughs, unprecedented droughts, sea-level rise that will force millions from their homes, large-scale extinctions, and the outbreak of new diseases. Against this background, you and your classmates from around the world must maintain a relentless focus: redesigning every city on the earth, reengineering production processes, reimagining the global food system, and reinventing transportation.

World population will increase from 8 to 10 billion people. And through a heroic effort, ramping up in the 2020s, your generation will completely phase out fossil fuels, rewiring the entire planet with a new generation of renewable energy technologies. At the end of the day, you have to shepherd both the human race and the remaining species on the planet through a critical bottleneck in human history, where rising populations, aspiring to ever-higher levels of consumption, are running up against critical global resource shortages. Above all, you will roll back emissions of global warming pollutants and stabilize the climate. In doing all this, you will create tens of millions of jobs, help lift billions of people out of poverty, and build a global economy that is truly sustainable.

Yours will be, must be, the Greatest Generation. But where do you learn how to lead this kind of change?

C2C Fellows:
They Don’t Teach This in School

The C2C Fellows Network, offered through the Graduate Programs in Sustainability at Bard College in New York, is an international program for undergraduates and recent graduates aspiring to leadership work in sustainable politics, NGO’s and business.  Led by Dr. Eban Goodstein, an economist and Director of Bard GPS, C2C offers intensive, skills-based workshops to young people from across the country and the world — teaching you the critical knowledge you typically don’t get at university. C2C leads active trainings.  Young  leaders from across the world work in teams to hone skills in visioning, courage, networking, storytelling and raising funds and resources. Graduates of these workshops join a global network with access to continuing educational and professional opportunities. There is no cost to atttend the workshops.

C2C stands for Campus to Community, and to Companies, to Congress, to Corporations, to Capitol, or to City Hall — overall, to CAREERS WITH IMPACT. We give young people the tools to make a difference soon, because they have to. C2C Fellows is designed for students and recent graduates who have leadership ambition, and provide them with the knowledge, skills, courage, and a powerful, ongoing network, to lead the change. Ready to join us?  

Our next virtual, one-day workshop, free of charge, is on December 7, 2024. The training begins at 9 AM Saturday and ends at 5 PM that day. Apply Now! 

Graduates of the workshops join a national network with access to continuing educational and professional opportunities, including dedicated scholarships to attend Bard’s Graduate Programs in Sustainability: Masters of Science degrees in Environmental Policy and Climate Science and Policy, Masters of Education in Environmental Education, and the Bard MBA in Sustainability, the #1-ranked Green MBA in the US. 

How to Make a Difference, Tomorrow

Young people know they need to make big changes in the world, in their 20’s. According to C2C Director Goodstein, the C2C program agenda was based on what he was hearing back from students. “They tell us, ‘We have a vision. Now we need to know how to tell our story and build networks; we need to know how to raise money and ask for resources.’” Based on this feedback, Goodstein and the team at Bard built out the C2C training platform.

Over ten years, more than 800 students have graduated from the C2C workshops, held twice yearly, in December and March. Pre-covid, the workshops were in person on the Bard campus, but with widespread familiarity with zoom tech, the C2C team decided to move fully on-line. The team compressed the format into a one-day, 9-hour workshop. This reduced travel expenses (and carbon footprints) for participants, and increased accessibility to international participants, while still delivering on key skills and building network connections. 

“Ten years from now”, says Goodstein, “you won’t remember much detail about the classes you took this semester. But you will remember clearly the key lessons from the day you spent with C2C Fellows. Why? Because you will have put them to good use changing the world”. Don’t miss the C2C opportunity: Apply Now.