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STUDENT-LED PUERTO RICO TRIP FINDS STALLED RECOVERY
By Evangeline Liu | April 1, 2018
Closing in on the six-month anniversary of Hurricane Maria’s landfall in Puerto Rico, a group of Carnegie Mellon students led by Tiffany Taulton, a graduate student in Heinz College majoring in public policy, visited the island on an “alternative spring break.” The group, besides bringing donations to help the island, spent the week helping some of the most vulnerable segments of the Puerto Rican population and learning about the fragile nature of the island’s natural ecosystems. In an interview with The Tartan, Taulton gave a summary of the trip’s activities and her reflections on the island’s current condition.
STUDENTS TRAVEL TO PUERTO RICO ON ALTERNATIVE SPRING BREAK
By Valene Mezmin | March 4, 2018
Over spring break, a group of 13 Carnegie Mellon University students and a student from the Community College of Allegheny County, representing the Homewood Children’s Village, will travel to Puerto Rico to take part in an Alternative Spring Break program. The 10-day trip, from March 9 to March 18, will be spent helping local farmers rebuild and plant crops and meeting with government officials and local community leaders to learn about ways locals have struggled to survive after the disastrous effects of Hurricane Maria.
The trip is being led by Tiffany Taulton, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, Caroline Morin, a senior Chemical and Biomedical Engineering double-major, and Sterling Wells, a junior majoring in Decision Science.
LEARNING AND VOLUNTEERING IN PUERTO RICO
April 19, 2018
While many of her peers were celebrating Spring Break at the beach or another relaxing location, CEE/EPP student Ariana Sabbat was working to help the people of Puerto Rico recover from hurricane damage. Sabbat was selected for the Puerto Rico Spring Break Relief project due to her interest in climate change resilience planning, agriculture and energy sustainability, and service.
Sabbat was surprised that nearly six months after Hurricane Maria hit, there were people in Puerto Rico without roofs, water, and, electricity. “The island is still experiencing the effects of the storm—in poverty and damage—and I wanted to help and learn from members of the different communities,” she says.
CMU STUDENTS RAISE MONEY FOR PUERTO RICO
March 25, 2019
Over spring break, a year and a half after Hurricane Maria, a group of 13 undergraduate and graduate students from Carnegie Mellon led by Tiffany Taulton, a masters student in Heinz majoring in public policy, visited Puerto Rico on an "alternative spring break" trip. Prior to the trip, the students had raised over $4,000 in donations to help the island in its ongoing recovery efforts. As summarized in several posts from Taulton on the CMU in Puerto Rico Facebook page, the students on the trip had the chance to learn from and work with various groups and people working on environmental-protection initiatives on the island. Read More
