SEAS reDirect Foundation fellows developed practical solutions with local impact

By Sarah Meadows (MS '26) |

December 3, 2025

The reDirect Foundation’s fellowship program partners with the Ann Arbor Office of Sustainability and Innovations (OSI) each year to connect University of Michigan students with opportunities for hands-on work with the city.

This year’s fellows were three University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) students, all specializing in Behavior, Education and Communication (BEC).

Working closely with city staff and a faculty advisor, students utilize reDirect’s Supportive Environments for Effectiveness (SEE) Framework to develop strategies that support the city’s neighborhood resilience, sustainability and climate action goals.

Through this collaboration, which is facilitated by SEAS Professor Raymond De Young and reDirect’s Director of Communications & Programs Paige Porter (SEAS MS ’21), student projects have addressed a range of issues, such as the implementation of solar programs and proposals for building neighborhood resilience networks.

Developing a mobile solar unit

One of this year’s fellows, Meredith King (MS ’26), worked with the OSI on their resilience team, assisting them in the development of a new project using a Sesame Solar Unit.

“It’s essentially like a big trailer, but it’s a mobile nanogrid,” King explains. “It’s outfitted with solar panels on the roof, hydrogen fuel cells in it, and can produce a lot of clean energy and store it.”

King, a second-year student at SEAS, says the goal is to offer it to the community as a resilience and education tool, and one that can also be used as an emergency response tool in the future.

“The city wants to use it as a decarbonization tool, such that if there are events or buildings that the city wants to partner with, they can provide clean energy, and also use it as community engagement and education,” adding that the trailer “is like a living learning lab or a mobile museum. People can go in and interact with sustainability in a tactile way, understand what it means to them, and get involved in A2Zero.”

De Young notes that King’s guidelines for using the Sesame Solar Unit follow a change in how information is being used to change behavior.

“There’s always a gap between concern for the environment and actually changing our behavior,” says De Young. “But that gap is rarely filled by simply increasing knowledge about ‘why' we must change. The SEE Framework suggests that it’s equally, perhaps more, important to provide information about “how” to change. All of the reDirect fellows have helped bridge the gap by including procedural knowledge in their deliverables – providing the practical skills that are essential for changing behavior."

King says that she decided to study at SEAS because the programs have an interdisciplinary focus, and it is one of the only graduate programs that offers the opportunity to specialize in BEC.

“SEAS has been able to open my eyes up to a lot of new opportunities,” says King, reflecting on the experience of the internship. “It was really cool to be able to apply an academic theoretical model that we’ve learned in class to real-world scenarios and problem solve.”

She says the lessons she’s been learning at SEAS were integral to her experience at OSI, particularly the SEE Framework, which is “all about creating effective and supportive environments.”

Understanding microplastics in our laundry

Another fellow, Bridget Damon (MS ’25/MURP ‘26), is a third-year dual-degree master’s student in Urban and Regional Planning who says she came to SEAS because it had the perfect combination of what she liked in undergrad, with “one of the only master's programs that has a dedicated environmental psychology program with BEC.”

As a Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) for De Young’s undergraduate ENVIRON/PSYCH 360: Behavior & The Environment course, which is also offered at the graduate level, Damon says she was exposed to a lot of the material connected to the fellowship, such as the SEE Framework, before she even started the internship, which, for her, was on the circularity subteam, focused on the circularity of textiles.

Damon says she was able to assist with OSI’s textile education and help them start up their monthly clothing swap. One big piece of her fellowship was the creation of a cardboard washing machine named Mr. Whirl-wide, an interactive and engaging educational tool built to teach people about textile microplastics.

“I made a little cardboard washing machine that individuals can engage with when they visit events hosted by OSI, because a lot of microplastics come from the laundry process, especially washing,” she says. “The Huron River, according to a study from 10 years ago, had the highest amount of microplastics out of all of the Great Lake tributaries,” which is what made OSI and the circularity team interested in an educational tool to teach people how to reduce microplastics.

Alongside the washing machine, Damon also created a true or false, fact or fiction game called “Hang It Out to Dry: Laundry Fact or Fiction!” featuring a clothesline with statements on printed out versions of clothing to mimic air drying, to engage individuals and make them really think about microplastics in the laundry process.

Damon shared how she found it really exciting to see how she could bring the work she was doing at SEAS to a larger scale for the entire Ann Arbor community. Thanks to her work, the City of Ann Arbor now hosts a clothing swap on the third Thursday of every month, which Damon says is not just environmentally friendly, but also “trying to reduce the financial burden of people getting clothes.”

She thought her time at OSI through the reDirect Fellowship was really impactful, and she feels grateful for the opportunity to continue working with them through this fall.

Climate and justice-centered food purchasing

Melika Sizar (MS ’26) was the third fellow. With a bachelor’s degree in architecture, Sizar spent a few years in the field before deciding to become a middle school innovation lab instructor. This is where she realized her love of education, and what inspired her to come to SEAS to study behavior change and its role in environmental education.

In addition to BEC, Sizar is also specializing in Environmental Justice. She hopes to create just and equitable opportunities for children and adults to learn about climate change and the systemic forces that create unequal vulnerabilities, so they can better understand and challenge the structures that lead to these unfair situations.

Sizar says that she was able to use a lot of the information she learned in De Young’s EAS 560 Behavior and Environment and EAS 561 The Psychology of Environmental Stewardship courses, specifically on how the brain works and how we understand and process information, and then using that knowledge to help change behaviors.

For her fellowship, Sizar worked alongside Azella Markgraf, the sustainable food coordinator for OSI, who ensures that city-related food purchases follow guidelines focused on valued workforce, equity and justice, climate and environmental criteria.

Sizar primarily assisted Markgraf in guiding city staff in understanding the importance of these guidelines through the SEE Framework. She says she developed a one-pager and a checklist to confirm that the criteria are met for food purchases.

“For the entire year, we learned about the SEE Framework in school, but there’s nothing like actually doing it in action. It wasn’t until those three months that I was really able to put those theories into action,” Sizar says. “Now that I understand how it [the SEE Framework] works, I use it on an everyday basis. When you understand how the brain works and how people process information, you can communicate with individuals better and help them understand concepts better.”

She says that the tools and knowledge she gained during the fellowship are being put to good use in a new role as a Student Life Sustainability intern with U-M’s Planet Blue. She works with their Sustainability Lending Library, which offers access to common-use items to students and student groups, to reduce waste, purchasing and consumption as a campus resilience hub.

All three fellows had the same piece of advice to students beginning their summer experience search: Talk to your professors.

“Try to make as many connections before the summer starts so that those connections can help you with your internship, especially with professors. If I didn’t have a connection with my GSI or my professor, I would have never gotten this opportunity,” says Sizar.

For De Young, a common thread across all reDirect fellowships, both during this and in past years, is the focus on neighborhood-scale interventions.

“Environmental psychology is not just about the individual, nor does it emphasize community in its more abstract forms. It’s grounded in the study of the everyday interrelationships among environments, humans and other-than-human life. The focus on the neighborhood scale is intentional since it allows students to see the possibility of pragmatic interventions and conduct small experiments that test their impact,” says De Young.

You can find this article on University of Michigan's website at: https://seas.umich.edu/news/seas-redirect-foundation-fellows-developed-practical-solutions-local-impact

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