Vision

After watching the documentary on food waste, “Just Eat It” and playing the game “Solutions”, our Sustainability Club realized what a huge impact eating a plant based diet and reducing food waste at home can have. Initially we wanted to focus on both of these issues, but we found we were unable to really measure the impact our action project would have at our particular school (we do not compost). So we focused our energy on promoting a plant based diet. We called it the “Eat Less Meat Challenge”. Here is our website: https://sites.google.com/hdsb.ca/crw-sustainability-cookbook/the-contest

Action

To promote our challenge, we made a video telling the school community why this was important, and how easy it is to help the environment in a fun, enjoyable, TASTY way! We made a video, daily announcements and let the school community know about the challenge well in advance. We also asked the community BEFORE we did the contest to share their favourite recipes, which we then put on our website. To enter the contest, people had to go to the website, choose a recipe, make it, take a picture and upload it to share! We wanted to entice people to participate and see how easy it is to eat less meat, so we had amazing prizes such as a plant-based cookbook, reusable paper towels and zip-top bags, and of course, freezies for the class with the most participation.

Reflection & Celebration

I think we definitely raised awareness about how easy and delicious it is to help the planet! However, its REALLY hard to get people to change their habits, especially in a measurable way. I’m hoping all the capacity we built as a club, and planting the seed of how easy and helpful it is to include plant-based more often hits home for families in the CRW community.

Links