Sustainable Schools Alliance We are excited to share with you that this summer SCOCO will launch the Sustainable Schools Alliance – bringing together parents, students and school staff to share best practices, leverage resources, and partner on joint efforts. The Sustainable Schools Alliance will provide them with a forum to share their challenges and successes and encourage the cross pollination of ideas and solutions across K-12 schools and school districts. Contra Costa County needs our education community to be informed about sustainable solutions and inspired to help make them happen.  With our schools facing deep budget cuts, this sharing of best practices can provide cost savings and creates a win-win solution.  Our County includes 18 separate school districts instructing over 187,000 K-12 students.  Mt. Diablo Unified, California’s 12th largest with over fifty schools that span a very diverse demographic, recently shared that they have made several exciting changes at specific campuses that will save hundreds of thousands of dollars while reducing their overall consumption of natural resources.  We are excited to be in a position to connect teachers, parents and students to help these types of changes ripple to surrounding schools and districts.  Empowering this community with knowledge about sustainability and ways to adopt and implement best practices will have long-term effects.  Reminding our youth that the actions of every individual can and do make a difference is crucial and gives them hope for their future.   Our specific plans include hosting semi-annual gathers for teachers, parents and students where we can discuss and share best practices on a wide variety of topics including waste reduction, health, nutrition, ways to reduce air and water pollution, safe routes to school, consortium purchasing policies, edible landscaping, and how schools can support (and be supported by) local economies. Contact info@sustainablecoco.org for more information.