All right, good afternoon everybody Thank you guys for being here. I'm Greg Hill and I'm a high school teacher. I teach at Horne High School in Mesquite, Texas And I along with my partner in crime Celeste Reynolds. She'll introduce herself here in a minute

We're going to talk about team activists. This is a new initiative. We're starting here this year We're a part of teach OSM and for years teach OSM has Tried forever in a day To to get teachers high school teachers

To use open street maps, but we've met several roadblocks Along the way, you know, whether it be you know, this is just You know tracing boxes tracing squares, I don't have time in my curriculum, how does it fit in a curriculum? So we together she and I Came up with the idea of this kind of bottom-up approach by by taking it to the students

And allowing the students to take it and run with it To to create the next generation of mappers. So we came up with the name is actually Celeste is creation OSM team activists

Because we want them to be activists in using open stream app to be activists in that regard And so we started this spring in 2021 as a high school organization Again, they introduced students to open street map. A lot of them have never heard. They're like open street who? And also to to meet professionals who use OSM their profession to see that you can actually

Use this and not necessarily make money, but you can use it in your everyday work Because even in the genre of geography, there's a lot of students we encountered they're like, what can I do with this? And there's we're trying to up the ante by promoting geographic education

But at the same time promoting geography as a profession So we further want to create opportunities for these students as well as their educated because we do also invite Teachers to come in we've had community college Professors come in to learn about OSM and become familiar with OSM And and and it didn't create this pipeline we've even had William William who was who spoke earlier and

Richard had sent students who spoke earlier as well from GW Their youth mappers organizations have have since students that worked as a guest mappers And and we want to create a pipeline for you future youth mappers and also future geographers

So Celeste teaches in Mashpee, Massachusetts And I do want to publicly give her credit because she is the reason I'm I'm even involved with open street maps She'd get been pester me for years and years. Hey Greg, you got to try open street maps. I'm like open street what?

and you know, it's Something that that she really is inspired me and it's inspired a lot of other teachers in doing so You Know we've what we've done. We've hosted for Mappy eyes with guest mappers. We've had people like Erica Hagen Like I mentioned before we've had youth mapper students from George, Washington

We've even had go to Dr. Lee Schwartz Who's the the geographer of the United States and as I mentioned also before we had Willem and the Texas Tech youth mappers our last Mappy hour we had Courtney Clark from everywhere She met and she also works for the American geographical society

so Up to date. We've had over a hundred students and teachers participate from 11 states in Canada and We're going to continue to have these monthly Mappy hours with guest speakers to inspire students We're going to introduce mapathons next year. That's our next step because we kind of gave wet their appetite

with our with our guest speakers And eventually want schools to create chapters And again create a mentorship program between youth mappers and other organizations and in the high school chapters Which we hope to lead to internship opportunity for high school students who become advanced mappers and kind of put some kind of codify

You know this eventually and so we look forward to you know Maybe some of you guys out there in the audience Maybe being one of our guest mappers and then at the end we want to induce a spirit of service through service learning

And that's been the really big draw for for students is you know, we're actually helping people miles away by mapping on open street maps Thanks. And so there's our Email if you want to contact us you want to work with us partner with us, please reach out to us We'd love to talk you will be at the table at the end and hopefully Celeste can join with our audio