On the Green Champions podcast recently, Danna Lotz shared something that stuck with me.
She’s the school programs administrator at SWACO, the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio. Before that, she was a teacher for eighteen years.
During her teaching days, she discovered that SWACO would sponsor school trips to the local landfill. So she started taking her students. She was skeptical at first. A landfill field trip. How exciting could that be?
But from that first visit, something shifted.
They drove all the way up into the landfill itself. The kids were glued to the windows. They saw piles of perfectly good furniture. Mountains of cardboard. Car parts, buckets, things that still had life in them. And without prompting, the questions started. Why is this being thrown away? Why does this happen? What can we do about it?
When they got back to the classroom, she didn’t have to convince them of anything. She didn’t need to explain why sustainability mattered. The conversation had already changed. These were elementary students, fired up about waste and resources, because they had seen it with their own eyes.
What struck me most was what happened next. The kids didn’t just absorb the lesson and move on. They came back with ideas. They wanted to brainstorm. They started saving paper for crafts, upcycling cereal boxes into book holders, making holiday gifts out of materials that would have been thrown away. Danna let them lead. She let their creativity run wild. And year after year, she brought more teachers along until the whole team was going on these trips, and then those teachers started talking about it, and it spread.
That kind of momentum doesn’t come from a slide deck.
It reminded me of something I’ve noticed in my own life. I’ve always learned more by doing, because all of a sudden the context becomes real. Something happens when you move from abstraction to presence. The statistics stop being numbers. The problem stops being a concept. It becomes a thing you can see, smell, feel, and name.
I see this pattern in social entrepreneurship all the time. We try to inspire people with data, with frameworks, with compelling arguments. We build presentations. We refine our pitch. We hope the logic will land.
But nothing replaces firsthand contact with the problem.
The founders who sustain their energy over years are rarely the ones who read about an issue and decided it mattered. They’re the ones who got close enough to feel it. They sat with someone struggling. They walked through the environment where the problem lives. They let themselves be changed by what they witnessed, not just informed by it.
There’s a reason for this. When you encounter a problem intellectually, you’re still holding it at arm’s length. You’re processing it through assumptions, through frameworks, through what you think you already know. But when you get your hands in it, your body learns something your mind couldn’t teach you. You start to feel the weight of what’s at stake. And that feeling has a way of staying with you when the excitement fades and the work gets hard.
Danna mentioned a statistic during the episode. SWACO receives 5,000 tons of waste every day. That’s about a thousand elephants worth of trash. And 76 percent of it could have been diverted.
Those numbers are striking. But I don’t think they would have moved those second and third graders the way the landfill did. They needed to see it. They needed to stand inside the scale of the problem before they could imagine themselves as part of the solution.
If you’re trying to create change, start there. Get close. Go where the problem lives. Talk to the people affected by it. Let yourself be a little bit overwhelmed.
The motivation tends to follow.