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J.G. Workman’s X-TREME IGiveAShirt forWater Projects

Vision

Our Action Team attended LSF’s Youth Leadership Forum. We learned about sustainability topics and skills such as honey bees, water, endangered animals, and sustainability, which made us interested in pursuing an Action Project about the issues of water and reduction of plastic water bottles. The reason behind our campaigns is for a more sustainable World. The issues to be addressed are to rethink and refuse all single-use plastics and to spread the message about textile use and abuse as well in order to promote a more circular economy. This is so important to our community and our planet because the plastic pollution and over consumption of textiles is taking over our oceans, seas, and waterways and landfills and the animals, people, and all living things are affected by this. We helped all living things by continuing with our Save the Sea Ice Campaign for Polar Bears and Through Various Campaigns throughout the year which began with our X-TREME IGiveAShirtCampaign early on to spread the word about plastic and textile pollution.

Action

To fix these issues, some actions we have taken were to continue partnering up with a climate change organizations, such as Polar Bears International, Greenpeace, David Suzuki, and TRConservationA in order to communicate these issues with our school, and find ways to volunteer in our community. Our “Rethink What You Drink ” Campaign has been successful in teaching about and helping us realize the effects of single-use plastics on our environment and on the health of every living thing and we want to #breakfreefromplastics as much as possible. Our Project #IGiveAShirt & More @J.G. Campaign has been successful at opening everyone’s eyes to textile pollution. We delved further this year by investigating the sea animals like whales and turtles and Polar Bears affected most by this pollution. The action plan is to educate our school and community about the harmful effects of textile and plastic pollution on oceans, seas, and waterways and the animals which are dying because of this pollution we are causing through our actions. Ultimately, this affects all of us. We depend on our youth to make a difference by taking initiatives to create a zero-tolerance to single-use plastics and textile waste at our school and in the community. We have taken leadership and dove beneath the surface to discover how we can be solutionists instead of contributing to the pollution and waste. Eco leaders collected all single-use plastics and created an art installation with these plastics in the past. We had an X-TREME Eco Justice Fashion show for our #IGiveAShirt& More Challenge at our school in November/December. We are working on creating logos for a reusable water bottle to sell to raise money for these issues in the future. In January we created a mural of sea life to highlight our IGiveA Sweater Campaign, and our slogan was “#PutonASweaterandBeCANADIAN! for our Save the Sea Ice/Sea Life Campaign this year. We continued on into March for our XTREME Earth Hour by Bundling up for Polar Bears and our XTREME Water Drop Event. For Earth Month and Beyond we participated in Our Xtreme PlasticGrabBag Event and collected plastic bags to keep them out of the landfills and waterways for The Recycling Council of Ontario. We participated in our Annual Toronto Clean-Up at our School. We are in the process of completing our XTREME Bag2School Event this Friday-#X-Treme IGiveAShirtSweaterShoesBeltsetcEvent@JG #Donate2SaveSeaLifeandBeeCANADIAN. The Youth have taken great leadership in all out XTREME Events.

Reflection & Celebration

We were successful in our campaigns because we got the whole school community motivated to make a difference in this world. We realize that inspiring change in others and in ourselves requires time and giving 1 shirt can make a difference or putting on a sweater and turning down the thermostat can make a difference.
The participants are the members of the X-TREME Eco JustICE League @ J.G. and they were all involved in different project activities to eliminate plastic and textile pollution in order to help save sea life and other endangered animals and ourselves.

A culminating activity was our trip to Edwards Gardens to participate in a Program called Water Ravines of Toronto. The Xtreme Team did actual water testing in the Wilket Creek and did some hiking. This hands-on activity helped us reflect about this precious resource called Water and being in Nature helped us see the we can make a difference by getting our hands wet so to speak. With the monies we receive from Bag2School Collection we will purchase a Water Refilling Station in the near future. We will continue to branch out to different organizations to make a difference in this world. We will keep building on all our campaigns.

Links

11. Sustainable Cities and Communities
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