Personal Narrative: Joining The Environmental Club

Being that I was on the board of Key Club at our school, an international service organization dedicated to serving and helping the surrounding community and the world, I established a meeting with the rest of the board of the club to collaborate a plan on what we could do to help. We decided to talk to administration at Boylan in order to get approval so that we could go along with our plan to get recycle bins throughout the school. Key Club held bake sales and other fundraisers to raise money in order to purchase the recycle bins. After we raised enough money, we were able to get recycle bins in every classroom in our school. It was a success! Now students actively recycle there used, recyclable items everyday. Other Key Club members, board officers, and I empty the recycle bins from each classroom every Friday after school ends for approximately an hour. Even though we do not get to join the rest of the students who are free to get out of school right away at 3:05 p.m. every Friday afternoon, we are making a difference in the school, community, and world with all of our hard work. Our next step within this upcoming school year is to raise enough money to purchase recycle bins for the cafeteria also! I cannot believe how much we have achieved through such a small idea, but I also cannot wait to see how we can change our school to be more

I think that my family realized that I had crossed the threshold between childhoods when I began to form my own opinions. This first took hold when I took part in poverty stimulation at my local shelter. I was giving a character and a story behind the card I was given; the story made me become emotionally attached to this name I had been assigned and the family in which I came from. The experience made me question the prejudice of the society I was living in. How many times had I avoided eye contact with the people on the side of the road begging for money? I began a long journey of soul searching and questioning the beliefs my parents had raised me on. My thoughts were continually brought back to a book by C.S Lewis, it was called Out of the Silent Planet; a character named Weston believed that individual human lives don’t matter, they must be sacrificed to save mankind.

I currently help service the community by giving back time through volunteering at different non-profit organizations as well as being involved with MSU Tutoring in the Office of Community Service at Morgan State University. I currently help the environment by recycling and volunteering at the Howard Peters Rawlings Conservatory and Botanic Gardens of Baltimore once a month. Before I graduate from Morgan State University I would like to create an Environmental Organization that focuses on consumption, recycle, and disposal issues within the Black Community. Once I am stationed on a Naval base I would get involved with the local community by empowering, and educating youth on STEM majors, especially minority females. I want future generations to know there are diverse career opportunities that differ from the standard teacher, doctor, and lawyer responses usually heard in school. I would also always recycle and become involved in organizations that focus on keeping Earth sustainable for all of

An experience that has greatly influenced my understanding of the world has been my participation in Florida Atlantic University’s Pine Jog Fellowship. The Pine Jog Fellowship is a three-semester program that focuses on environmental improvement and education. In the Pine Jog Fellowship I have had the opportunity to develop my own environmental service projects that would benefit my community. During one semester of my fellowship, I coordinated beach clean-ups for Lake Worth Beach. I recruited over sixty people and collectively, we recycled and threw away over one hundred pounds of trash off of Lake Worth Beach. I also spoke to local fishermen and educated them on the dangers of throwing monofilament fishing line into the ocean. During the

As my high school is very small with less than 800 students, there are very few clubs to join, but I did my best in finding ways to get involved. Over the past two years, I have been a member of We Group, a student-led club that raises funds and supplies for local and global communities. In We Group, I was solely responsible for creating documents, like permission forms and master lists, and arranging the collection of pledges and permission forms. This year, we raised over 600 books for Books for Me!, an organization which distributes books to elementary school children in the Vancouver area. During the duration of the whole event, I was in charge of keeping in contact with the organization, so they could pick up the books. Moreover, in the October of 2014, I also became a member of the Delta Youth Advisory Council (DYAC), which is a group of Delta high school students that meets up monthly to discuss topics and issues pertaining to Delta schools. Through DYAC, I voice my opinion and ideas during these forums to

I joined the Make a Difference club on September 2016,where I completed my community service. I completed a total of 37.5 hours in the club.

Through working with clubs within my school and community I have volunteered at a number of river and road cleanups. The pollution in my town is overwhelming when you are the one cleaning up the environment and it makes one stop and think about why their community would not take better care of the earth. As an ambassador for the National Society of High School Scholars I would be able to inspire my generation to take better care of the earth by recycling and not littering. By educating my generation I believe we could start a serious movement which would tackle the problem of pollution not only in my community but in all communities in America and

The two main ways that we will engage with students is through a workshop with UCLA Residential Life’s Team Green on the Hill and a booth at the Earth Day Fair. Team Green is a student leadership program that encourages residents in the dormitories to make sustainable lifestyle choices through education, community involvement, and advocacy. By interacting with Team Green Hill Government Representatives, the Housing Team has the potential to impact a large number of students on the Hill. These student leaders organize programs for dormitory residents and have influence within their communities. The Earth Day Fair is another method for spreading awareness to students. The Housing Team hopes to acquire some free samples of green office supplies to give away during the Earth Day

The lives I would touch for my legacy would be my family and friends because those are the people that care about me and what I do. That they would help me out with anything I need. My major accomplishment would be a pro soccer player and go to Rutgers College. The other accomplishment in my life would be to get very good grades in school to get a good education.

When I think of the word legacy I think of how I will be remember and what I will leave behind for generations to come. I think of people like Martin Luther King Jr and Gandhi, whose impact changes the lives of many and the world as it was known during that time. I don’t think that my impact will be received on such a big scale like Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and many other but hopefully I will be able to touch the people who were close to me during my lifetime.

For example, each student in my business class needs to collect a minimum of 65 pairs of shoes to reach our class goal of 2,000 pairs for our Soles4Souls project. In the presentation, I really enjoyed the quote by Dr. Seuss stating, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not!” This quote made me reflect and realize that you really do need to care because if you don’t, nothing will be accomplished. To start making a difference you can start by thinking ecologically about the campuses. Wingate University has lots of green, LEED certified buildings, energy efficient lights, ‘green’ carpet, energy efficient boilers and recycling on campus. The university also has their own bike share program which minimizes driving and makes the environment and people healthier. I thought it was very interesting learning that the Wingate community also has a garden that grew 520 pounds of produce this past summer. Finally, I would love to join Wingate’s BIGG (Bulldogs into Going Green) program which is a sustainability student group that partners with other groups to promote the three aspects of

Opportunities are once in a lifetime. My junior year of high school I applied to join the Envirothon team. Although there were several applicants I was one of the few selected. Envirothon is an academic competition based on environmental science with five categories: forestry, wildlife, aquatics, soils, and current event. Within a team of five we take a test for each category together. The team with the highest combined test score, along with a prompt score moves on to the next competition. Opportunities are seen as learning platforms to me. Every category within Envirothon taught me something new. In soils, I learned how to tell what kind of soils are present and a rough percentage of how much clay, sand, and silt are in the soil by texture.

My school’s Earth Club has been a central part of my life since freshman year because of my understanding of the need for environmental preservation and conservation. While others may see us doing the menial work of collecting the school’s bottles and cans for recycling, we do much more. I and many others have attended multiple environmental restorations/clean-ups, but we also do work at the local level. The club organizes several school clean-ups throughout the year where teachers typically offer some credit or passes to students who help. Our advisor, as a social activist, has also encouraged us to take part in marches meaningful to us because “Earth” Club means more than preserving the environment. It means caring about and considering all

I am the Vice- President of the Environmental Club because a close friend formed the club and wanted me to be the co-leader. I am a naturally shy person and I have never had the best people skills. I took the position because I want to better my communication and leadership skills. The steps I am taking to achieve this goal is to always speak my mind on ideas I have but to also remember to get the opinion of other club members. I am also making sure to ask club members on feedback and accept constructive criticism on how I am handling the businesses concerning our club. So far I have noticed that I am having an easier time communicating with fellow students as well as teachers and other adults. Other steps I have taken is to constantly make

recycling campaign. The only way to do that is to help make recycling appeal to more of the vast student population that currently attends our University. How might this be done? The University already places a recycling bin in every dorm room around the campus; anything more would exceed the current funding for the recycling project. Perhaps the institution of a recycling center at the Russell House could cause the impulse to become a habit. But, that would take too much money--with the salaries of workers and the annexing of what would amount to a new wing of the building--to consider for too long. Another solution could be to have the students elect a "recycling committee" to evaluate the problem and decide on the appropriate solution. However, I feel that with the current lull in our recycling campaign, even that would be ineffective. As an altrenative to these two solutions I propose that we, as students and faculty united, institute a plan that is so simple it is already in place in many of the high schools around the state. I propose a system of rewards.