Wealth Wise is an innovative initiative targeting middle school students to bridge the gap in financial literacy within Arizona's challenging educational landscape. Through meticulous research, they aim to develop a comprehensive curriculum covering budgeting, investment, credit management, and banking principles, fostering critical thinking and financial independence. Collaborations with educators and interactive teaching methods are central to their approach, envisioning a future where financial literacy is fundamental to education, empowering a financially secure society.

The Human Chain: Exploring Poetry and Public Service is an anthology of collected poems that present the relationship between poetry and the concept of public service. Through academic and literary exploration, the main ties between the two concepts were identified as (1) loss, (2) community, (3) advocacy, (4) appreciation and (5) inspiration. The collection uses poetry to exemplify these thematic ties. The results of this project could be used to strengthen the relationship between the written word and organized volunteerism. There are many real-world applications of this literary exploration and is a vitally important relationship to delve into.

The creation of this study was driven by my belief in the importance of transforming and reimagining human-nature relationships for sustainable futures and my interest in understanding the implementation of nature-based learning in schools. Through observations of children in an outdoor education setting, I sought to answer the following research questions: “How do children that have engaged in nature-based learning view themselves in relation to nature?” and “What can be observed about children’s personal understandings of nature and their personal relationships with nature in their writing and drawings?” This study was implemented with participants in third grade outdoor education classes at a local charter school in South Phoenix using multiple participatory research methods. My findings add to an existing body of knowledge and research focused on understanding children’s relationships with nature and the impacts of nature-based learning. In the conclusion of this paper, I pose additional questions about conceptualizing children’s relationships with nature and exploring their nature connectedness through research, share reflections on my personal relationship with nature, and discuss how my observations support benefits of nature-based learning as argued by existing scholarship.

Given their manufacturing versatility, plastics have fundamentally changed commercial consumerism. Unfortunately, two of the largest drawbacks to current plastics on the market is their dependency on fossil fuels and their lack of circular recyclability. In this paper, the focus will be on the latter issue. Circular recyclability can be described as the idea of minimizing waste through its reformation back into a commodity. Currently, the primary method of recycling plastics, mechanical recycling, can only be achieved through melting and reshaping plastic for reuse. A significant drawback to this method is the reduction in chain molecular weight and subsequent loss of mechanical integrity through multiple reheating cycles. Chemical recycling provides an alternative where the polymer is broken down through chemically reactive sites, allowing the material to be recycled a theoretically infinite number of times and maintain its mechanical properties. Polyethylene, one of the largest classes of industrially produced plastic, does not have any commercially relevant chemically recyclable derivatives. The structure of polyethylene is primarily composed of long, nonpolar hydrocarbon chains that provide the material’s signature tough property. To make a material that can be depolymerizable for chemical recycling, polar ester functional groups must be added throughout the chain, allowing for chain scission by hydrolysis. Unfortunately, while the incorporation of ester functionality into polyethylene has been studied previously, material strength decreases as a result of this modification, sacrificing the integrity of the final product. Herein, I propose the incorporation of nucleobase pairings into the ester-containing polyethylene, which will add supramolecular hydrogen bonding reinforcements to improve the mechanical performance while maintaining chemical recyclability. This addition to the polyethylene backbone will be achieved by the synthesis of a ureido cytosine (UCy) diol, which contains 4 complementary hydrogen bonding sites for enhanced intermolecular forces between polyethylene chains.