Vision

Students can’t think well if they are hungry. Students want to make a difference in the world. As part of Team 17, a student initiated club at Ecole River Heights School, students learn about aeroponics and how to take care of a Tower Garden while feeding their classmates (and often themselves!). By using the 17 Sustainable Development Goals as a springboard for action, the students carefully plan events and opportunities that bring those goals to life. For this particular project, the students want to ensure everyone has access to healthy food.

Action

We have been running a club connected to the SDGs for 4-5 years now. The activities are all student initiated and our club has grown from about 5 dedicated students to nearly 30.
We have done so many actions around the goals and this year was no different. The funding we received was incredibly helpful to continue our salad club. Each Wednesday, Team 17 hosts Salad Club, where any person in the school is welcome to come to the library and Team 17 members help them make their own salads. The funding helped purchase more nutrients, rockwool (to grow the seeds), additional seed packs, PH testing kits and 4 bins to store and handily transport the materials needed for each of our tower gardens to different classes when they are hosting a garden for the grade 7 science unit.
We have offered Salad Club for approximately 32 Wednesdays, with an average of about 15-20 students coming to eat. We calculated that we are providing about 600 meals throughout the year.
This year we also attended the World Water Day Symposium at the Manitoba Museum, did a cereal drive, participated in Destination Imagination Service Learning (and won!) and a huge Stuff Swap! We were also invited to sit on a panel for our school division related to a session on “Caring for the Planet”. The students will be presenting their work at a session for many students in our division. In addition to that, Team 17 presented to the “Educators for Climate Action” teacher group one evening at our school. They have been very busy! And whatever they do or learn, they share it on the school social media to educate and inspire others.
Finally, the students wrote, acted, and directed a 16 minute long video to teach local elementary students about the goals, what they can do and what our Team is doing. They took this presentation to 4 schools, 10 classes of grades 5 & 6 and over 240 students! We will also be sharing this with our school as well, reaching over 500 students and staff. Finally, we will share on our social media platform where we have over 1600 followers.

Reflection & Celebration

We will be having our reflection on the year to review all the projects we completed and where we feel we found successes, and where we felt we could have done more.

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