Our Mission
Our mission is to analyze foreign environmental policy and how local American city governments can benefit by mimicking these foreign policies, promoting change by formulating and publishing our findings and by active involvement in the betterment of environmental
stewardship on our campus and in our city.
WORKING TOWARDS A BETTER TOMORROW.
The International Urban Sustainability Student Corps (IUSSC) is a student-run environmental think tank, class, and mentor system that is backed by the Institute of Environmental Sustainability (IoES) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Our mission is to assemble not only the brightest but the most driven minds among the UCLA student body to address the largest environmental/sustainability issues afflicting Los Angeles and surrounding areas. We accomplish this mission through a rigorous pursuit of interdisciplinary research on other foreign megacities, formulating solutions for Los Angeles’ issues through a close study on how other large cities in other countries have solved theirs. We innovate, engineer, advocate, and drive change. Our top objective for the winter-spring cycle is to provide the city with solutions for problems caused by increased waste production and storage.
How do we do this?
RESEARCH
STEWARDSHIP
OUTREACH
RESEARCH
The foundation of our organization is our research-- the work that we do in our think-tank-like and solution driven projects is the driving force behind who we are. We are not merely collectors of facts and numbers, we are researchers who actively engage with our community, surveying, calling, and visiting sites in order to be find and record the most accurate and reliable information. We are observers: we watch and record the way that the urban environment in Los Angeles evolves and grows.
stewardship
We strive to avoid the approach many researchers take with their subjects: we want to be actively engaged in our community rather than just study and observe it. We not only nurture a desire to research our environment, but we also cultivate an attitude of stewardship towards our city by encouraging our members to volunteer in our community.
outreach
We approach outreach in two ways: 1) we publish our results in journals and write articles in magazines. What's the use of research if you can't communicate it? 2) We attend a yearly summit at a host university in a foreign country in order to fully immerse ourselves in international sustainability methods. During this summit, we exchange research with students and professors from all across the world. We hope that this will allow us to find solutions to address some of the problems at home.
