Celebrating 10 Years of SCoRE!
Last week, faculty, students, partners, and sustainability leaders gathered at the Tech Square Clubhouse to celebrate a major milestone for the Center for Sustainable Communities Research and Education, known across campus as SCoRE. The event marked ten years of the Center’s work advancing interdisciplinary sustainability research, education, and community-centered collaboration at Georgia Tech and beyond.
“True sustainability comes from long-term partnerships rooted in listening and care within our neighborhoods, across universities, and beyond. Georgia Tech is a place people trust because it prioritizes relationships, not just innovation.”
The anniversary celebration reflected the breadth of SCoRE’s impact over the past decade. Attendees represented a wide cross-section of the ecosystem SCoRE has helped build, including Georgia Tech faculty and staff, graduate and undergraduate students, external partners, and representatives from peer universities and research institutions across the region. “It was beautiful to see so many students, faculty, staff, and community partners come together to celebrate 10 years of impact. Their stories served as a reminder that though purposeful collaborations, we all get further together,” said Anna Tinoco-Santiago, SCoRE’s Community Engagement Specialist. Throughout the evening, conversations underscored SCoRE’s role as a connective hub, bringing together people, research, and communities that might otherwise remain siloed.
Founded to support sustainable communities through research and education, SCoRE has spent the last ten years cultivating programs that lower barriers to collaboration and help ideas take shape. Originally launched in 2015 as Serve-Learn-Sustain, the Center was created to embed long-term sustainability and community engagement into Georgia Tech’s academic culture. Serve-Learn-Sustain strengthened sustainability education through its course affiliation program, themed event series, and unique offerings like “Buzz Courses” – short courses that offered students hands-on experience with community-based innovators and leaders in creating sustainable communities. In its current iteration as SCoRE, the Center has enabled researchers to test new approaches, form interdisciplinary teams, and pursue larger funding opportunities by leveraging SCoRE support such as its Faculty Fellows program and Signature Partnerships. SCoRE has also played a key role in catalyzing research groups focused on complex sustainability challenges, from energy systems and renewables to ecosystem health, resilience, and regeneration.
In recent years, SCoRE’s scope has expanded alongside emerging challenges at the intersection of sustainability, technology, and society. Its work engages areas such as emerging energy transition technologies, workforce development, and approaches to resilience focused on cultural sustainability. Rather than treating sustainability as a single discipline, the Center approaches it as a systems-level challenge that benefits from technical insight, social context, and long-term community partnership.
SCoRE operates in close coordination with the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems, which serves as an umbrella for sustainability research at Georgia Tech. This alignment has helped embed community engagement more deeply into the Institute’s research mission, strengthening connections between faculty, students, and community partners. In addition, Serve-Learn-Sustain’s role as a co-founder of the Regional Center of Expertise Greater Atlanta through the United Nations University has strengthened its ties to global sustainability education networks and frameworks, while grounding that work in local and regional contexts.
The anniversary event also highlighted SCoRE’s community-building efforts. Regular convenings such as the annual Sustainability Showcase, quarterly meetings, yearlong workshops, and ongoing support for fellows and students across multiple universities have helped sustain a growing network committed to equity-driven and impact-focused sustainability research. The Sustainable Communities Internship Program, which celebrated its eighth summer in 2025, is illustrative of SCoRE’s reach beyond the classroom and its commitment to offering students crucial skill-building in community engagement and advancing community priorities.
As SCoRE enters its second decade, the anniversary celebration served not only as a moment of reflection, but also as a signal of what lies ahead. For Associate Director Ruthie Yow, reconnecting with longtime collaborators underscored both how far the initiative has come and the potential of the work still to be done. “The opportunity to reconnect with so many wonderful partners from the past decade—those who helped SLS and SCoRE learn and share what community engagement, equity, and sustainability mean on the ground—made me deeply excited for what we can all accomplish together in the next ten years,” Yow said. Built on a strong foundation of collaboration, education, and applied research, SCoRE continues to shape how sustainability challenges are studied, understood, and addressed.
Click here to watch SCoRE’s photo showcase from the last 10 years.