There are nearly 70 million refugees and displaced people in the world today. Continuous conflict in areas of the world far removed from our daily lives in Idaho has created this crisis, and, experts say, the massive flow of humanity will only get worse as the world’s population pushes to ten billion mouths to feed by 2050. Not incidentally, the effects of climate change—effects that are growing more and more apparent—will only catalyze and exacerbate global conflicts and create more devastation in the regions that people are already fleeing. The takeaway? It’s only going to get worse.

Enter Scott Runkel and Elliot Jacobs, two teachers at Sun Valley Community School passionate about engaging their students in the issues facing their immediate and global communities. Elliot, who returned in the spring of 2016 from a year in Morocco with his family, was profoundly moved by what he witnessed abroad following the Arab Spring. As a parent of young children, he “imagined the impossible choices that parents must face” when their homelands dissolved into the chaos of civil war. The refugee crisis was not a distant idea to him. And Scott has long been concerned with the impact our ever-growing consumption has on the environment. His teaching and his daily life have long reflected his desire to be a part of a solution to the ever-looming environmental crisis—climate change. Motivated by current events, these two teachers put their heads together to create a project-based class that would allow students to engage with people impacted by the refugee crisis and work with them to solve one of the major concerns facing the resettled population—housing. Their class, a combination of Multicultural Literature and Environmental Science, seeks to address this problem with the student-led construction of an environmentally-sustainable Tiny House.