Collaborative Communities

Client: EnvironMentors

Project Team: BillPete

EnvironMentors is a national mentoring program (operating through the National Council on Science and the Environment) that supports student-directed research in environmental science while improving college access to underserved communities. Tamarack partner Bill Finnegan was a mentor in the original Washington DC chapter of EnvironMentors and later coordinated a youth video project called EnvironnMentors Investigators that was presented at the Environmental Film Festival in Washington, DC.

In 2009, EnvironMentors received funding from the National Science Foundation to scale-up their program through University-based chapters across the United States, with Tamarack as the “cyberlearning” partner. Central to the expansion of EnvironMentors was the creation of an online community where students and mentors and chapter staff could interact and learn collaboratively. We developed the EnvironMentors Community using the open-source CMS Drupal, harnessing modules that support social networking (Facebook connect, advanced notifications, profile pages with status updates and messaging functions, etc.).

Through this project we have created and continue to improve a dynamic digital platform for student-driven learning that is training the next generation of environmental scientists.

Other Website Projects