Our first core events consisted of direct engagement with our community. With them, we wanted both to create awareness and to evaluate the situation hands-on. For this, we decided to engage by participating in two already existing events aimed precisely at community engagement: San Pedro de Pinta and Callejero.

San Pedro de Pinta is a weekly outdoors event where the busiest avenue of our city is closed down during the morning, so that only bicycles and foot traffic are allowed. Its purpose is the promotion of a healthy lifestyle, besides the retaking of public spaces, thus presenting us the perfect opportunity to engage directly with the community. Organized by the Culture Department of the county’s government (San Pedro Garza García) and IMPLAN (The Municipal Institution of Urban Planning), it is attended by close to 15K people per week, and its facebook page has an outreach of 36K people.

We were able to meet the chairman of San Pedro de Pinta’s committee, with whom we talked about our project and our goal of engagement. After a thorough discussion of our approach and goals, she was very supportive of our project, and allowed us to put our stand in one of the busiest intersections. From there, we got the chance to engage in an active dialogue with people of all ages, in which we discussed mainly the personal approach of people towards their e-waste, while also getting the chance to talk about synthetic biology by explaining our project. We also used to opportunity to survey people and to invite them to participate in our e-waste collection campaign. In the end, we knew our event was a success because the president of the committee personally asked us to assist again, which we did gladly, reaching even more people.

Click Here to view San Pedro de Pinta’s Facebook Page

“Callejero” is also an outdoors event aimed at retaking public spaces. Organized every first Sunday of the month by our university, it is part of an initiative called Distrito Tec, in which the school aims to engage with the community of all the surrounding neighborhoods. This initiative is particularly important as the school has grown quickly in the last few decades, enclosing itself to the detriment of the surrounding community. We reasoned this was the perfect opportunity as our goal is aligned with Distrito Tec’s. Besides, it also has a great outreach: 28K in its facebook page. Like in San Pedro de Pinta, we engaged the community on their own turf, while also giving people the opportunity to bring us the electronic waste they had at home by collecting it during the event, as a prelude to our e-waste collection campaign which was afterwards developed in full.

Click Here to view Distrito Tec's Facebook page.