The Sprouts of Hope

Inviting You to Help Chimps in Tchimpounga

2012-01-18T19:06:00.000-08:00

Through Roots & Shoots we've learned a lot about chimpanzees and their habitat, and we've come to love them and want to do what we can to protect them. So when we learned about a fire at a chimpanzee sanctuary where these remarkable animals are watched over, we knew we wanted to help. This letter is our way of reaching out and inviting you to join us in this effort.

Dear Family and Friends,

We are writing to you as members of Dr. Jane Goodall’s Youth Leadership Council. As you may know, Dr. Jane has focused much of her career in the primatology field, working to protect chimpanzees and their habitat in Africa. In the capacity of youth leaders and council members, we wanted to let you know about the recent forest fire at the Jane Goodall Institute’s chimpanzee sanctuary and ask for your support in rebuilding this refuge.

We are involved in the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) through Roots & Shoots, Dr. Jane’s international youth leadership and community service organization. Another program that is run by JGI supports orphaned and endangered chimpanzees in the Republic of Congo. This chimpanzee rehabilitation center, Tchimpounga, is the largest chimpanzee sanctuary in the world, and provides a much-needed refuge for chimps who have been terrorized by the illegal bushmeat trade.

Watch a short video about a day in the life of chimps at Tchimpounga.

Recently, a wildfire struck Tchimpounga and destroyed much of the sanctuary and protected chimpanzee habitat. Fortunately, no chimpanzees or staff members were harmed in the fire. However, unless the Jane Goodall Institute can raise enough money to repair the damage done in the fire, these chimpanzees will have nowhere to go where they will be safe from poachers. Additionally, many of these baby chimps are orphans and are incapable of living by themselves in unprotected forests.

Please consider making a donation to support the rebuilding of Tchimpounga. Donations of any size can be made online at https://www.janegoodall.org or can be sent to 20 Stearns Street, Cambridge MA 02138, c/o Eliza Klein. Contributions are tax deductible and checks can be made out to Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Center. If you are interested in reading about our work with Dr. Jane and in Roots & Shoots, check out www.roots&shoots.org. Or, if you have any particular questions, please e-mail us at sproutsofhopekids@gmail.com.

Wishing you a happy and healthy new year,

Eliza Klein and Maya Ludtke

Northeast Youth Leadership Council

Roots & Shoots, Jane Goodall Institute

Sprouts: Energy Lite at the Northeast Youth Summit

2011-12-29T16:51:00.000-08:00

By Lilly

During the three-day weekend of Veterans Day, the Sprouts of Hope had the incredible opportunity to join in a day of activities and workshops with other groups at the Northeast Regional Roots & Shoots Youth Summit. In other years we’ve attended this magnificent event in Boston, but this time it was held in New York City, so we went to the city that never sleeps.

At the summit, the Sprouts of Hope presented a workshop about our book, "Energy Li te" and how it works in libraries for kids and families to borrow along with a Kill A Watt meter.

We began by introducing the members of our Roots & Shoots group — from left to right, Eliza, Lilly, Risa, Maya and Kaya.

Then we explained how we became interested in Kill-A-Watt meters and now they can measure the energy that our household appliances use. We told those who came to our workshop about our partnership with N-Star — when we tried out Smart Meters to measure energy use throughout our homes — and how they also gave us Kill-A-Watt meters to use.

Next, we explained how we put our book together — from coming up with ideas for what we’d write about to outlining it on index cards to writing its various sections. We shared the story of how we managed to get our book and Kill A Meters into public libraries in Cambridge, Boston, Medford, MA and Central Falls, Rhode Island; this is which is an ongoing project of ours and we are going to raise by crowdfunding online so we can get our book and a meter into all of the 370 public libraries in Massachusetts.

We used Kill-A-Watt meters to show how much energy three different light bulbs use — incandescent (they use the most), CFLs (less than incandescent) and LEDs (that use a lot less than even CFLs). We also showed how much energy a hairdryer uses. The answer: a lot, especially when turned on high — so try to let your hair dry naturally.

In our presentations about “Energy Lite,” we share information about energy use — and how to conserve use of it, but we also want to pass along a message that can help kids to make their ideas turn into real projects that make a difference in other people's lives. So we pass along our motto of the 3P’s — Partners, Patience and Persistence. These are the three things we keep in mind as we work to make our projects successful.

We told those who came to our workshop about our partners — our local utility, NStar, P3, the company that makes Kill A Watt meters and donated 20 of their meters to the Cambridge Public Library when we gave the library our book, and Shonak Patal, who created a local website called Swellr and came to talk with us about crowdfunding our project. We are grateful to all of them for their support and encouragement.

Our experience in working with our local library spoke to the value of partnerships in making big projects happen and about the patience and persistence that will be required of us as we try to raise money in the spring to make “Energy Lite” and Kill A Watt Meters an item that families can borrow from their local libraries across our state.

We hope people left our workshop with a better idea of how to take action. Those who came to it were very enthusiastic in what we are doing and showed a lot of interest in our book. One teacher took a copy to put into the library at her school, and two New Yorkers expressed an interest in getting our book into New York public libraries. Overall, we thought the workshop went very well and it was a great experience.

Sprouts: Stories About Chimpanzees

2011-12-29T13:12:00.000-08:00

By Kaya

Have you ever watched a commercial with an adorable chimpanzee grinning happily and using the company’s product surprisingly well? Little do you know that this chimp is not smiling but is actually wearing a look filled entirely of fright. What looks like a smile to us is really a grimace of terror for chimpanzees.

Our lead off speaker at the Northeast Regional Youth Summit was Bill Wallaue r, who shared with us his experiences of shooting video of the chimpanzees in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. He went to Tanzania 15 years ago and for all of the years as worked closely with Dr. Jane Goodall to record the lives of the chimps. He shared a horrible, yet moving, story of Lulu, a chimpanzee who was taken from her natural habitat and forced to act in commercials.

While thousands of people watched the harmless—or so they thought—commercial, poor Lulu was getting beaten for every little mistake she made —forgetting to walk around at the right moment, messing up her cue to dance, there was a punishment for everything.

A few months later, Lulu was found dead in a trash can, her body bruised and broken from the harsh treatment of her “owners.”

Hearing about such cruel treatment of these remarkable animals made the Roots & Shoots kids in the audience react with a long silence. How else could you react when you truly understood the story behind the chimpanzee advertisements you can see online or on television? Who knew those baby chimps were terrified and grimacing as they were forced to apply a fake smile on their faces?

From this opening talk — and from the summit workshops — I took home some important knowledge. The main reasons for the decrease in the population of chimpanzees include global warming and the depletion of their natural habitat, along with bush meat trade. Watch this video about what humans are doing to harm the chimpanzees.

But chimpanzees are also endangered when people “innocently” claim and force chimps out of their natural habitats and whip them into becoming the pets or performers they want them to be.The fact that people could knowingly kill an innocent chimpanzee makes me furious. An estimated 6,000 chimpanzees are slaughtered each year, mainly due to the bushmeat trade. But they also die when people take these innocent chimps out of their natural habitat—only to kill them later when they get bored and tired of the responsibility of taking care of them.

Chimpanzees have not captured us to control and then kill us, so why are we displaying such disgusting treatment towards them?

Leadership: Teaching, Learning, Sharing

2011-12-29T12:29:00.000-08:00

By Maya

In the second time slot of the summit, the New England Youth Leadership Council members—including Eliza and me—helped run a workshop on youth leadership. There was a great turnout with many more people than we expected.

To break the ice, we started out with a fun game of Ninja. After loosening up we gave a short overview of what we were going to do. To begin, we talked about the “leadership compass.” It displays four different styles of leadership, using the directions of north, south, east and west. I am west—analysis, and Eliza is east—vision.

Find out what kind of leader you are by looking at the 4 major leadership styles, below.

Each person chose the style that suited him or her best. It was fascinating to find out the amount of diversity in leadership styles in just one room. When we divided ourselves into groups — based on our style, we discussed the qualities and aspects of how we lead. This activity gave people a chance to analyze themselves as leaders and discover how they best interact with other leaders.

As a small challenge each group also had to write a haiku describing their direction. After this exercise, the youth leaders talked a bit about what it means to be one as well as some of the things we have all taken away from the experience.

Anyone would be able to see how dedicated we are to the job of being a youth leader and how we have formed unbreakable bonds with one another; we are truly able to understand and relate to one another.

The workshop went extremely well. Everyone worked hard, yet it felt very relaxed and comfortable. Since the workshop happened, some participants have contacted me about thinking of joining the council. Out of the whole day of activities, the youth leadership workshop was probably my favorite!

Here is a photo of the Youth Council Leaders who were at this regional summit. Serving on the Roots & Shoots Youth Council is a lot of fun and a great learning experience.

4 Major Leadership Styles

North: Action

Assertive, active, decisive
Likes to determine course of events and be in control of professional relationship
Enjoys challenges presented by difficult situations and people
Thinks in terms of “bottom line”
Quick to act or decide; expresses urgency for others to take action
Perseveres, not stopped by hearing “No,” probes and presses to get at hidden resistances
Likes variety, novelty, new projects
Comfortable being in front
Values action-oriented phrases, “Do it now!”, “I’ll do it”, “What’s the bottom line?”

South: Empathy

Understands how people need to receive information in order to act on it
Integrates others input in determining direction of what’s happening
Value-driven regarding aspects of professional life
Uses professional relationships to accomplish tasks, interaction is a primary way of getting things done
Supportive to colleagues and peers
Willingness to trust others’ statements at face value
Feeling-based, trusts own emotions and intuition, intuition regarded as “truth”
Receptive to other’s ideas, builds on ideas, team player, noncompetitive
Able to focus on the present
Values words like “right” and “fair”

East: Vision

Visionary who sees the big picture
Generative and creative thinker, able to think outside the box
Very idea-oriented; focuses on future thought
Makes decisions by standing in the future (insight/imagination)
Insight into mission and purpose
Looks for overarching themes, ideas
Adept at and enjoys problem solving
Likes to experiment, explore
Appreciates a lot of information
Values words like “option,” “possibility,” “imagine”

West: Analysis

Understands what information is needed to assist in decision making
Seen as practical, dependable and thorough in task situations
Provides planning and resources, is helpful to others in these ways and comes through for the team
Moves carefully and follows procedures and guidelines
Uses data analysis and logic to make decisions
Weighs all sides of an issue, balanced
Introspective, self-analytical, critical thinker
Skilled at finding fatal flaws in an idea or project
Maximizes existing resources - gets the most out of what has been done in the past
Values word like “objective” “analysis”

Sprouts: Making Music To Inspire Others

2011-12-29T11:06:00.000-08:00

By Eliza

Before we reached the school where the Youth Summit was being held, we came upon the site of what was then Occupy Wall Street, so we wandered through it. The next week the police arrived and forced the protesters to leave.

During our Northeast Youth Summit, the Sprouts of Hope took part in the Making Music to Inspire Others Workshop.

Two of the Sprouts helped to run this workshop. We talked about different kinds of music and how artists make a difference by helping to change the world. We listened to Bob Marley and other inspiring music and made a mural of things that the music reminded us of.

Then, at the end of the workshop, we all had a jam session with instruments we’d brought. Two of the Sprouts even had their ukuleles with them!

Music at the summit also existed outside the doors of the Making Music workshop. The Sprouts all played and sang songs about peace at the apple cider social following the day’s summit events, and we tried to get others to sing with us. This was a fun way to keep up the positive Roots & Shoots vibes going. Another good thing that came out of having our instruments with us in New York was that while we were waiting for the bus, we started a sing along – and some random strangers joined in!!

And at the subway in Grand Central Station we were greeted by music that these people were playing.

These are great examples of how music can bring people together. Overall, music added so much to the summit. We learned about many cool musicians at the workshop and were also able to share our love of music with the world.

New York "Sprouts" Adventures

2011-12-29T10:01:00.000-08:00

By Risa

On our first morning in New York, we went to the United Nations to see an exhibit, “Design With the Other 90 Percent: Cities.” Using photographs and objects, the exhibit shows how people who live in poor city neighborhoods are improving their lives in sustainable ways. A few things really stood out to me.

In Medellín, Colombia, the local government built a cable-car system in one of its poorest slum areas that runs from the top of the hill to the bottom. Residents now get to work faster and more safely. The trip could take 2 hours on a crowded bus; it now only takes them 7 minutes. Libraries and schools were built to improve how kids spend their time; this gives them the chance to create a better future for themselves. It is also a much safer neighborhood now with 26 homicides instead of 381 per 100,000 residents each year.

In Ecuador and Nicaragua, bicycle pumps and toy helicopters are made into medical tools. It is amazing to see how people save lives by making these tools out of common items and for little money.

In Rio do Janeiro, Brazil, a few guys decided to experiment with a mural painting project in what was then a dangerous community. Their goal was to engage young people who lived there to help them paint. The project expanded far beyond their original plan when they employed local people to create some huge paintings that covered many houses and an entire staircase. The painters received a diploma and now see their work every day in their neighborhood; many aspire to be professional painters, and some of them want to take their painting to other parts of their city or to nearby villages.

The group is planning a bigger project that would cover a whole neighborhood and affect hundreds more people. Being a part of this project keeps young people busy and gives them a reason to feel good about themselves.

It is sad to see the conditions these people live in, but it is also extremely inspiring to see solutions that improve their lives. Sometimes it is the simplest solutions that solve the most complicated problems.

The Highline

On Sunday morning we visited the Highline. You can see us at the start of our walk on the Highline in our Memphis caps — a gift from our friend, Linda Potter, who generously arranged for us to have wonderful seats at the Broadway show, Memphis, the night before. She’s been involved with the show since before it came to Broadway and knows some of the actors, so she made it possible for us to go backstage after the show.

Memphis was spectacular, and it was incredible to be able to meet some of its stars. Thank you, Linda!

The Highline was once an elevated railroad that paralleled the West Side Highway with tracks going directly into buildings that housed factories and meatpacking plants. During the last decade, designers with a different vision transformed these abandoned tracks into a pedestrian walkway where the tracks are visible in the soil of a flowering landscape. We were on this elevated walkway for many blocks, as we walked under buildings, over streets, and next to windows where people live and work.

The Highline walkway is well made and well designed. W ith benches along the way, it is a nice place to sit and watch others walk by. In a covered area, a man played a banjo, and a bit further on we came to wooden steps leading down to a glass wall. We sat against the glass and watched cars speed by below us.

Built in 1934, the idea of the Highline was to raise the tracks in order to lower the number of train-related injuries and deaths. The Highline trains stopped running in 1980, and 19 years later “friends of the Highline” dedicated themselves to the challenge of turning it into a public walkway. The contrast between the tracks, the plants and the architecture on either side of the walkway works well; there is always something interesting to look at, but the feeling is very calming, too. In bustling Manhattan, this place seems very natural and forces you to take your time.

The Sprouts of Hope — Peace Doves and Songs

2011-10-11T16:47:00.000-07:00

Sprouts Celebrate Day of Peace

By Eliza

In late September, the Sprouts of Hope travelled by bus to Providence, Rhode Island to spend a day at the nearby Roger Williams Park Zoo. There we celebrated the international day of peace, as we'd done last year with Roots & Shoots in Boston.

Throughout the day, we worked with Roots & Shoots members from other communities to do various peace-related activities with kids who came to the zoo.

At one table, we helped kids make mini peace doves. It felt great to promote peace and tell so many people about Roots & Shoots.

In the afternoon's peace parade, we held up a giant peace dove as Roots & Shoots members and friends marched together around the zoo, singing about peace. A lot of the kids waved the mini peace doves they’d made. It was so much fun!

We also were able to get a tour of the zoo from Denali, a Roots & Shoots member who knows this zoo quite well. It was awesome to see all the animals and walk around the zoo. Overall, the day of peace celebration was a great experience and we can’t wait for next year.

Sprouts of Hope: Yard Sale + Food Sale Fundraiser

2011-06-28T07:01:00.000-07:00

Raising Money — To Give It Away

By Maya

On June 5, the Sprouts of Hope held our third yard sale. As usual, we filled our driveway with stuff we've outgrown or don't need but others might like to have. We sold books, games, toys, clothes, kitchen appliances and accessories, books, ice skates, rollerblades, bikes, shoes, plants, jewelry, bags, printers, and just about anything else you could think of. And we baked yummy cookies and our friend, Pu Zhang, cooked homemade Chinese dumplings. They are always a big hit, and we sold all of them within an hour of their arrival.

All of the Sprouts pitched in with donating things to the sale and being there while it was going on.

The yard sale was a total success! We raised a total of 825 dollars, and now we've donated that money to three organizations, City Sprouts (a gardening program at public schools in Cambridge), The Sprouts of Hope Fund (named after us, as its founders, the fund helps kids who don't have the resources to participate in Roots & Shoots be able to do so), and Doctors Without Borders.

To each, we donated 275 dollars!We also received items from other friends. As one part of the sale we did a silent auction for some of the special items, including my bike (I am now going to ride the one my mom used to ride), a hand carved Native America bowl, and a huge art set.

Prior to the sale we created colorful signs and hung them up around our neighborhood. We also put the information on to Craigslist and spread the word through Facebook and at school.

When the day came, it was miraculously clear and sunny. A lot people stopped by, and we sold a ton of things! When it was over, we loaded up our parents' cars and made trips to

Goodwill to donate the remaining stuff. Just our leftovers alone filled more than two huge cars!

It feels great knowing that we were able to raise all of this money, and send it off to help out three great causes.

We hope to hold another yard sale so that we can recycle what we don't need to others and then use the money we raise to make a difference in other people's lives.

2011-06-12T06:23:00.000-07:00

Using Our Book to Teach about Energy

By Eliza

On Saturday, May 21^st, the Sprouts of Hope had the opportunity to display our book, “Energy Lite,” at the Cambridge Climate Change Week ActionFest.It was very exciting to spread the word about our project to people who, like us, are interested in global warming and the environment. The event took place at Cambridge College, and people from many organizations gathered to educate the community about the issues facing our planet. Among these organizations were the Cambridge Energy Alliance and the Cambridge Climate Emergency action group.

The Sprouts set up a table with copies of our book and Kill A Watt meters. We gave out information about “Energy Lite,” Roots & Shoots, and energy conservation in general. We had a raffle (people filled out an energy conservation pledge to enter), and at the end of the day, we raffled off two Kill A Watt meters.

We also baked cookies in an oven while we measured with a Kill A Meter how much energy we were using! Just the smell of cookies cooking lures people to our display.

During the past few weeks, we have been very active in spreading the word about our book. On Thursday, May 19^th, two of the Sprouts were able to attend the HEET Vampire Hunt and Efficiency Ware Party, where we got to talk to some interesting people about projects that we have worked on for several years as Sprouts – as well as our hopes for the future.

Speaking of the future, it seems as if all of our hard work at getting the word out about “Energy Lite” is paying off. Recently, Green Decade/Cambridge gave us a $300.00 grant to print more copies of "Energy Lite," and now we've found out that our book will be going into the Boston Public Library system. From the books we printed with our grant, we are giving the Boston libraries 40 copies to spread throughout their library branches — and they will be paired with Kill A Watt meters that are already there. And a nonprofit organization called Boston Climate Action Network (BCAN) will use “Energy Lite” as a way to teach kids about energy use and conservation this summer. And four copies of “Energy Lite” are going to be put into the Medford (MA) libraries, too.

We are very excited about these small steps forward, and hope to continue promoting energy efficiency in the future.

Sprouts of Hope: Recycling in Cambridge

2011-05-12T04:06:00.000-07:00

Spreading the Word About Recycling

By Lilly

The Sprouts of Hope had the opportunity to participate in some fun events in Cambridge —the Mayfair and Fresh Pond Day. The MayFair is a festival that happens every year in Harvard Square on the 1^st of May, and it is always a very exciting and fun event. At the MayFair, we worked with Meryl Brott, who oversees recycling for the city, as volunteers for The Department of Public Works.

Our job was to walk around the MayFair and survey people about what they know about recycling in Cambridge. Meryl also had set up a booth where people could come and ask questions about recycling and composting, and take free posters, information packets and stickers.

Surveying people was hard work, but it was also a lot of fun! It was interesting to see how many people were unaware of certain things they can recycle. For example, many people did not know that they can recycle hard plastics like broken laundry baskets in their curbside recycling, and they were very interested when we told them that they could.

We did a similar thing a week later on Fresh Pond Day — and we are going to help Meryl again in early June at the Riverfest. Risa, Eliza and I set up a table very similar to the one we had at the MayFair. We also set up a compost bin to catch people’s interest by showing them what it looks like. Many people came to us with questions about composting, recycling and rain barrels.

It was a very fun experience and we were able to help a lot of people get answers to their questions.

Sprouts of Hope: Earth Day

2011-05-12T03:25:00.000-07:00

Becoming Friends With the Earth

By Maya

On Earth Day, April 22^nd, I volunteered at the Boston Children’s Museum. Early that morning I took the T into South Station with Kelly Sullivan, another member of the Roots & Shoots New England Youth Leadership Council. We were going there to do activities with kids about helping take care of the Earth.

When we got to the museum, we headed up to the second floor family room. Kellan Hays, who is the media and program coordinator for Roots & Shoots Northeast, and two Roots & Shoots interns, Fiona and Katie, who were also volunteering, were already there.

We had three tables, and on them we set out an animal matching game, a recycle scavenger hunt, and a wishing tree for the Earth. For the animal matching game kids paired up pictures of baby animals with the mama animal. After they did that they could flip the cards over and learn a cool fact about the animal. One little girl had me read and explain every single card for her!

For the scavenger hunt kids took lists and ran around the room looking for different materials, checking off the ones that could be recycled and those that could not. Then, they could do a recycling word scramble.

The tree for Earth was my favorite activity. Kids took different cut outs—a bird, a star or a leaf, and they wrote messages about the Earth on them. They said what they love about the Earth, what they do to help the Earth, or what they could do to help the Earth. By the end of the day the tree was barely visible. The notes and drawings were all very cute and inspiring!

Everyone seemed to greatly enjoy the activities, including me. I can definitely say the day was a success and I am looking forward to doing this again next year.

Sprouts of Hope: Learning About Sustainability

2011-04-27T17:03:00.000-07:00

Sustainability—Now a Part of Our Schools

By Maya

The Sprouts of Hope had the opportunity to meet with the Cambridge Public School’s new Sustainability Coordinator, Kristen von Hoffman. She has a lot of experience with environmental issues; before she took this job, she was the founder of Greenfox schools, a nonprofit organization that works to make schools green and sustainable.

One of the things that Kristen does is work with Meryl Brott to expand composting in the schools!

together a manual with Frequently Asked Questions that explains how to set up composting in a school cafeteria —and we hope all of the schools in Cambridge will be doing this soon.

So far, King Open, the 9th Grade Campus, and the Graham & Parks schools are composting their cafeteria leftovers. From September to February, these schools have composted more than 14,500 pounds and saved more than 14,500 lbs of CO2, according to Meryl and Kristen. That's equal to the weight of 1.75 elephants.

Kristen is now working to create and implement a sustainability plan for the school district. The five main categories she uses to look at the whole picture of the sustainability in the schools are energy, waste, food, products, and green space. She devised a report that outlines the major goals and she named the program, Cambridge Green Schools Initiative (CGSI).

She wanted to hear our ideas as she works to create a CGSI website. Here are a few we came up with:

Making a YouTube video

Advertising on Facebook

Drawing a logo

Posting photo albums and other visuals

Tying in with our blog—The Sprouts of Hope Kids

Advertising in areas around the high school

Holding contests to get kids involved

Thinking of a motto

Including sustainability projects in community service hours

Raffles

Having kids take a sustainability pledge

Including links to a group page

Anything else to engage the community.

We even started think of more acronyms for the five parts of sustainability — energy, waste, food, products and green space — and by the time Kristen left we had sketched a possible logo that she took home with her.

During the meeting we also discussed the importance of biodiversity, reforestation and, of course, sustainability. Population is increasing, so sustainability is vital. We all can and we all need to make a difference.

Kristen also told us about geo-engineering. Geo-engineering is about the way we look at changing the world while keeping in mind the big picture. Sustainability is one of the components involved with engineering the earth. A main focus is eliminating the effects of climate change. She told us about some of the earth-saving inventions, such as panels that deflect sunlight and how it ultimately deflects heat; naval ships that can do chemical reactions for climate change; and man-made trees that suck in carbon dioxide and transfer it into hydrogen.

We definitely learned a lot from the meeting and we are hope to have a chance to follow up on all the ideas we discussed to launch a great website for CGSI.

Sprouts of Hope: Collecting Socks for Homeless People

2011-04-27T16:49:00.000-07:00

Being Part of the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Sock Drive

By Eliza

Socks can reduce the risk of skin infections, prevent frostbite, and foster good hygiene. Many homeless and poor people do not have access t

o clean socks.

When we went to the sock drive finale and delivery party, we learned more about BHCHP and their yearly sock drive. We found out that last year, 13,000 pairs of socks were donated during the sock drive. That is a lot of socks, and hopefully this year there will be even more!

We listened as Cecilia Ibeabuchi, who works at the BHCHP clinic as a nurse, explained that homeless people aren’t allowed to take their socks off in shelters in order to prevent infections and bad smells. But this means that homeless people’s socks get really dirty. Often, this means they have to use plastic shopping bags as socks.

She invited us to come by the foot clinic so we could see how our socks are being used —and learn more about what she and the volunteers do when people arrive there with foot problems.

The Sprouts contributed 65 pairs of socks to the sock drive, and it felt great to be supporting people in need. We were able to exchange business cards with nurses and volunteers who work at BHCHP and we hope to continue our partnership with them in the future. Overall, it was an inspiring event and a cause worth learning about and celebrating.

Sprouts of Hope: Learning About Sustainability

2011-04-24T12:05:00.000-07:00

Sustainability—Now a Part of Our Schools

By Maya

One of the things that Kristen does is work with Meryl Brott to expand composting in the schools!

Meryl helped King Open to start a pilot composting program and now she and Kristen are working with other schools to make composting part of what kids do with food waste. The city’s Department of Public Works, where Meryl works, put together a manual with Frequently Asked Questions that explains how to set up composting in a school cafeteria —and we hope all of the schools in Cambridge will be doing this soon.

She wanted to hear our ideas as she works to create a CGSI website. Here are a few we came up with:

Making a YouTube video

Advertising on Facebook

Drawing a logo

Posting photo albums and other visuals

Tying in with our blog—The Sprouts of Hope Kids

Advertising in areas around the high school

Holding contests to get kids involved

Thinking of a motto

Including sustainability projects in community service hours

Raffles

Having kids take a sustainability pledge

Including links to a group page

Anything else to engage the community.

We definitely learned a lot from the meeting and we are hope to have a chance to follow up on all the ideas we discussed to launch a great website for CGSI.

Sprouts of Hope: Collecting Socks for Homeless People

2011-04-12T15:41:00.000-07:00

Participating in the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Sock Drive

By Eliza

For the second year in a row, the Sprouts of Hope decided to participate in the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program (BHCHP)’s sock drive. BHCHP is a city-wide nonprofit organization that provides health care for homeless people in Boston, and every year in the early spring, they have a sock drive. Socks can reduce the risk of skin infections, prevent frostbite, and foster good hygiene. Many homeless and poor people do not have access to clean socks.

When we went to the sock drive finale and delivery party, we learned more about BHCHP and their yearly sock drive. We found out that last year, 13,000 pairs of socks were donated during the sock drive. That is a lot of socks, and hopefully this year there will be even more!

She invited us to come by the foot clinic so we could see how our socks are being used —and learn more about what she and the volunteers do when people arrive there with foot problems.

The Sprouts contributed 65 pairs of socks to the sock drive, and it felt great to be supporting people in need. We were able to exchange business cards with nurses and volunteers who work at BHCHP and we hope to continue our partnership with them in the future. Overall, it was an inspiring event and a cause worth learning about and celebrating.

Giving Back: Volunteering to Help Others

2011-01-17T15:53:00.000-08:00

Donating Clothing for Boston Health Care for the Homeless

By Risa

A few weeks earlier four of us—Lilly, Maya, Kaya and me—donated winter clothing in a benefit for the Boston Health Care for the Homeless. We used some of the money we’d raised to buy new pieces of winter clothing like hats and gloves and scarves and mittens. (They wanted items of clothing that were new, not used.) Then we got to go skating at the amazing huge rink at Bright Arena at Harvard University.

This was our way of showing support for the terrific work of Boston Health Care.

Last spring we were a part of its spring drive to get lots of white socks for people who they treat who are homeless. Eliza, especially, got lots of people to donate socks as part of her bat mitzvah project at her temple and the rest of us convinced some of our friends to donate socks, too. After we gathered several big bags of socks, we took them to the main building of Boston Health Care for the Homeless. And Dr. Jim O’Connell, who has directed Boston Health Care for the Homeless for more than two decades, gave us a tour of the new facilities across the street from Boston Medical Center.

We learned about all of the ways the staff of doctors and nurses and dentists and social workers take care of people who are homeless. So when we heard about this clothing drive, we wanted to do what we could to help.

All of us had a great time at the skating event, and we felt great about donating the clothes to the homeless. We even got to take pictures with Santa! It was a great way to spend a few hours of our weekend— hanging out, skating, and helping a great cause.

Energy Efficiency: A Field Trip to Navigant

2010-12-22T17:21:00.000-08:00

Machines and the Energy They Use

By Kaya

On December 8^th the Sprouts of Hope took a field trip to visit Tim Sutherland, an energy efficiency expert who heard of us being interviewed on the Callie Crossley radio show on June 22nd. At that time we were talking about the new book we’d written called “Energy Lite,” and how it was going to be in the Cambridge Public Library for families to borrow along with a Kill A Watt meter.

Tim was driving in his car when he heard us talk about our Kill A Watt book project. He told us that he was excited to hear us —as teenagers—talking about using the same kind of meters that he relies on to measure the energy efficiency of machines like air conditioners and washing machines.

When we met him, Tim told us he thought it was amazing that we’d done this book about saving energy by using Kill A Watt meters—and he wanted to meet us.

He works for Navigant Consulting where he does projects for the U.S. Department of Energy. He is paid to figure out how technology can be made more energy efficient. He works with Heather Lisle, and on the day we visited, their colleague Judy Reich was there, too, with her son and daughter, who are about the same age as we are.

Tim and Heather spend their time taking apart different kinds of machines, such as washing machines, refrigerators and freezers and window air conditioning units. They both studied science in college and Tim majored in aerospace engineering and rocket science at MIT before he decided that he wanted to do something about energy efficiency. We found out that Heather graduated from Dartmouth after studying earth science and physics. Judy studied mechanical engineering, aerospace, and science research.

Now they all work on these projects at Navigant, where they take apart and test appliances. By doing so they learn the best designs that create more energy efficient machines. They use a sophisticated meter to gauge the energy use of each machine as well as its stand-by (vampire) power usage. With a washing machine, the goal is to find ways for the machine to use about 0.01 watts when the power is off.

After Tim and Heather told us about their work, they showed us various parts of a washing machine that they’d taken apart—and we learned how magnets can work to make them more energy efficient.

Tim also told us about LEDs, which stands for Light-emitting diode, and he explained how these lights are even more energy efficient than compact fluorescent bulbs (CFL). You can see Eliza holding an LED in her right hand and a CFL in her left.

Right now the LED bulbs are very expensive compared with CFLs and incandescent bulbs. But as was the case when people started to use CFLs to replace incandescent bulbs, these new LEDs cost a lot more to buy. However, they also last a lot longer than CFLs and consume less energy. So pretty soon it’s likely that more and more people will be using them. And LEDs don’t have the mercury problem that CFLs do, so they aren't a health problem if you drop them and disposing of them isn't so complicated.

Since we've gotten accustomed to using CFLs and like knowing how much energy we were saving by using them, we were shocked to find out how much more energy can be saved by using LEDs. Thanks to Tim and Health for showing us this difference.

We had a fun time visiting with Tim and Heather and Judy and learning about their jobs and seeing where they work. Hopefully sometime we can work together on a project.

Endangered Species: Our Roots & Shoots Youth Summit

2010-12-22T16:26:00.000-08:00

Face-to-Face With a Dodo Bird

By Maya

On November 13^th we went to our third annual Youth Summit held by the New England Roots & Shoots. This year the theme was endangered species. We started the day by listening to a speech and watching a power point presentation about various endangered species. We learned about how extinction is a natural process, but also how it is now caused in part by what humans do.

At the end of the opening session, the Sprouts once again won an award for our work with environmental issues—and for being New England Roots & Shoots’ most active group. During the rest of the day we split up to go to our different sessions. In them, we learned about polar bears, sustainable eating, parrots in Guyana, projects in Brazil and Ecuador, and recyclable art.

During our lunch break at the summit there was also a photo shoot going on. The photographer was our good friend John Tagiuri, who my mom and I first met at an energy efficiency fair in Cambridge. The Sprouts met him when he asked us to dress up like the Statue of Liberty and hold a CFL bulb where the torch would be.

Last year at the Youth Summit, John took cool photographs of us standing on the earth (okay, it was really a ball) and kicking plastic water bottles away while we held reusable ones.

This year he came up with a really fun idea that involved endangered species. He had us pose with an extinct animal—the Dodo Bird. Each of the Sprouts posed for numerous shots—and then we posed together. John printed them while we were there and then hung them on the wall. Later we got to take them home after we filled out a form about our summit experience.

We received T-shirts and bags full of coupons and snacks. It was really a great opportunity to meet new Roots & Shoots groups and to hear about the projects they are doing. The Youth Summit was a lot of fun, thanks to the incredible efforts of Roots & Shoots director Kellan Hays. Thank you, Kellan!

Sprouts of Hope: Celebrating Peace and Chocolate

2010-11-24T04:20:00.000-08:00

Celebrating a Day of Peace

By Eliza

On a Sunday in late September, the Sprouts attended one of our favorite annual Roots & Shoots events: The Roots & Shoots International Day of Peace Celebration! This Day of Peace is a great way to meet new people, spread the word about Roots & Shoots, and celebrate peace with other Roots & Shoots members. At the Day of Peace, we ran a table where little kids could create and decorate musical instruments out of recycled materials.

Later in the day, we walked along Jamaica Pond as we carried Peace Doves. The kids who made musical instruments played them as we walked. It was a lot warmer than it was the last time we carried the Peace Doves—in the First Night parade in Boston on New Year's Eve. Here we are sitting with the Peace Dove we are about to carry.

At the table next to us, a woman named Danielle was giving out chocolate samples. She talked with people about fair-trade chocolate and promoted Theo chocolate, the company that she works for. Theo donates proceeds from certain chocolate bars to the Jane Goodall Institute, so this is why Danielle was at the Day of Peace. We thought that it was really cool how Danielle’s job involved chocolate, and she offered us the opportunity to help out at the next event that Theo would have a table at!

We gladly took Danielle up on her offer. In late October at the Boston VegFest, a big annual celebration that more than 10,000 people attend, we helped Danielle hand out chocolate samples, tell people about Theo chocolate, and run the table. It was a very fun experience, and it felt great to help an organization that donates to the Jane Goodall Institute and Roots & Shoots. We hope to continue the partnership that we have with both Theo and Danielle in the future.

Sprouts of Hope: Launching "Energy Lite" at the Cambridge Public Library

2010-07-15T10:26:00.000-07:00

Energy Lite + Kill A Watt Meters

By Maya

On Tuesday night, June 22, the Sprouts of Hope had a gathering in the main Cambridge Public Library to announce and celebrate the launch of our book, "Energy Lite" along with Kill A Watt Meters into the library's system. This means that people in Cambridge -- and in surrounding communities that are part of the Minuteman Library system -- are now able to check out these two items together and use them to learn more about their energy use at home.

When we arrived early to set up our display table to showcase our book, we were delighted to discover a bunch of our books. It was really fun to see our words and pictures as a printed book and a bar code on the front; this will be used to keep track of the books when families check them out of the library. Seeing all of this meant that our idea of creating a book that families could use to teach their kids about smart ways to use energy really had happened -- and that felt good.

Next to the books we found specially designed packages, each containing a Kill A Watt meter and ready to be put on the library shelves, too. Each meter is inside of a molded plastic box and there is a lot of information about how to use the meters on the outside and the inside of each case. And it was very cool to find that our name -- The Sprouts of Hope -- is on the meter packaging, too. It also has a similar border design around the rim as the one I drew for the book's cover.

We are so grateful to P3 International -- the company that makes Kill A Meters -- for donating 20 of them to the Cambridge Public Library. Their donation made a big difference in making this project happen at the library; now every copy of our book has a companion Kill A Watt meter that can be checked out at the same time.

We also want to thank New England Roots & Shoots for ALL of its great support of us while we work on this book and for the mini-grant they gave us that enabled 50 copies of "Energy Lite" to be printed in a partnership with the library, which paid for the printing, too. We will use some of these copies as we work with Roots & Shoots and other partners to find ways to get this book into libraries in other communities.

At this event we held a raffle -- with the prize being a Kill A Watt meter that we bought to give away. Guests didn’t buy tickets to enter; they simply filled out a card pledging what they would do differently in their homes to conserve energy -- and they came up with some good ideas. A fellow classmate of ours turned out to be the winner.

Although mostly filled with mingling and refreshments, there were a couple brief speeches. My mom, Melissa, talked about the terrific partners we had that made this possible for us to do, and thanked our friends, John Taguiri, whose photographs of us illustrate the book, and Lois Fiore, who helped design the pages. Sally Sharp-Lehman, who directs the New England Roots & Shoots program spoke about how what we did fits into the spirit of Jane Goodall's vision of what kids can do to make a difference. [And Dr. Jane Goodall wrote words about our book that appear on its back cover, and we are grateful to her for doing that.] Henrietta Davis, the Vice-Mayor of Cambridge, praised our work, as did Sarah Kennedy, an assistant to Mayor David Maher, who could not be with us that evening. Hearing them talk so positively about the value of our project to the community made us feel like we'd done something very worthwhile.

Here's a photograph of all of us together.

Of course, the Sprouts of Hope got a chance to talk, too. Melissa asked each of us question about our work on the book or Kill A Watt meters or thoughts about the project in general, and I think by doing that the people who came to the event learned about why and how we decided to do this project. [Earlier on our blog we wrote how we went about creating Energy Lite, so I hope you'll go back and read that.]

The launching of our book at the library went really well, and now it’s up to people to check out our book about learn about energy conservation.

A story was published in Cambridge Day, an online news site, and you can read it at:

http://tinyurl.com/2bp48rl

Earlier in the day we had an amazing opportunity to appear on The Callie Crossley Show, a public radio program on WGBH in Boston, to talk about "Energy Lite" and some of the other things we do as the Sprouts of Hope. We were really nervous about doing a live radio show, so we practiced a lot on how to make our answers make sense. When we finally did the show, I think it went well. You can listen by clicking on this link and then listening to the show from June 22. We're the first ones on the show and she talked with us for about 20 minutes.

http://www.wgbh.org/programs/programdetail.cfm?programid=855

We are going to be looking for ways that "Energy Lite" can reach even more people. If you have some ideas -- or would like to work with us to see if you can have a copy in your library -- please let us know.

Sprouts of Hope: Our amazing year with the Brotes de Esperanza

2010-06-06T08:54:00.000-07:00

Joining Forces with the Brotes

By Eliza

As the school year winds down, I cannot help but think about all of the amazing projects and events that the Sprouts have taken part in. Out of everything that the we have done this year, the thing that stands out most to me is our sisterhood with the Brotes de Esperanza – a Roots & Shoots group that we helped to start as a way to put the Sprouts of Hope fund into action.

I remember the day we talked about recycling and the Brotes de Esperanza kids drew some really cool signs that they were going to use to remind people to recycle. We did something like that at King Open, too, when we were working on our Waste Free Lunch campaign.

I realized how special our bond with the Brotes has been in early May at the Roots & Shoots Youth Leadership Summit with Jane Goodall, when, after asked what about Roots & Shoots made me most proud, I answered confidently: “Knowing that in a few short years, the Brotes de Esperanza could be having this same conversation with Dr. Jane. Knowing that these smart, passionate kids are following in my footsteps.”

To me, being able to pass down the magic of Roots & Shoots - as a Sprout of Hope - is way more special than starting a composting program, writing a book, cleaning a river, or attending a leadership summit. Mentoring the Brotes has made me realize just how lucky I am to be a part of Roots & Shoots.

I am so proud to be a role model for young Roots & Shoots members. I know that our partnership and sisterhood with the Brotes will continue for a long time -- We are already planning for next year! It has been so much fun to join forces with the Brotes. As Ryunosuke Satoro once said, “Indivually, we are a drop. Together, we are an ocean.”

Sprouts of Hope: Jane Goodall Visits King Open

2010-06-06T08:40:00.000-07:00

Celebrating Composting with Dr. Jane

By Eliza and Risa

This May, after a long, tiring Roots & Shoots-filled spring, the Sprouts of Hope participated in yet another exciting event with Dr. Jane Goodall -- an event that took place at our school!

Dr. Jane Goodall came to King Open, the Sprouts of Hope greeted her outside and showed her the murals the King Open community has painted. (You can see Risa with Dr. Jane in this photograph.) One of them is about immigrants who've come to Cambridge; the two other ones are at our school’s entrance. One is a replica of the Sistine Chapel, but with people from King Open painted on it, and the other shows Dr. Martin Luther King, with our school's name on it, too.

Then Dr. Jane went into the auditorium, where she greeted students with a pant hoot. Kids responded and it seemed like they were having a lot of fun.

She came to our school to congratulate us on a very successful year of composting. King Open’s composting program, which the Sprouts of Hope helped to start a little over a year ago, has saved more than 13,000 pounds of food waste that otherwise would’ve been dumped into a landfill!

Dr. Jane not only congratulated students at King Open for saving the planet, but she also came to our school to spread the word about composting. At the whole-school assembly where she spoke, she encouraged other schools to start composting – and since the mayor of Cambridge, the superintendent of schools, and some school committee members were at the assembly, we are hoping that her message (and ours!) will make a difference.

At the assembly, Dr. Jane spoke a little bit about her life, as well as the Jane Goodall Institute, Tacare, and Roots & Shoots. She encouraged students to get involved. Her message to us was that simple things – like composting our school lunches – make a difference. As she always says: “Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a difference!”

Four students – ranging from kindergarden to fourth grade – demonstrated for Dr. Jane how composting works in our cafeteria. It was a fun to watch, even though the kids got in the wrong order and some compost went in the trash!

Our science teacher, Donna Peruzzi, led the Q & A with Jane Goodall. Microphones were passed through the crowd and kids asked questions such as “What do chimpanzees eat?"

It was really special to have Dr. Jane come to King Open. Here is what Anne Driscoll wrote about her visit to our school in Tonic.com:

"The five girls who belong to Sprouts of Hope Roots & Shoots group had lobbied the Cambridge School Committee and the school superintendent to create a conservation plan and install special composting bins in the King Open School cafeteria. The group hopes to expand the program and replicate it at other schools.

In addition to the six and a half tons of garbage saved from a landfill, their composting program also prevented the release of additional methane gas, which becomes 70 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a green house gas. Besides, Goodall says it's the small efforts now that pay off big dividends later.

"You can't expect a child to suddenly become involved in everything," Goodall was quoted as telling the King Open students. "You have to start somewhere."

We gave Dr. Jane a King Open shirt. We hope she remembers her visit at our school as much as we remember having her with us that day. It meant so much to us that she took time from her busy schedule to come to King Open and congratulate us on our efforts to compost.

To read more about Dr. Jane's visit to our school, you can click on these links:

Dr. Jane Goodall + The Sprouts of Hope

2010-05-15T07:02:00.000-07:00

Presenting “Energy Lite” to Dr. Jane Goodall

By Kaya

On May 1, the Sprouts of Hope attended a very special event, which took place at the Roger Williams Park Zoo, in Providence, Rhode Island. Along with 12 other Roots & Shoots groups from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Maine, we had an amazing opportunity to spend the day with Dr. Jane Goodall. Yes, it was extremely exciting. Although we had already met her a few times in the past, we were still ecstatic. After all, it was Jane Goodall!

We began our Saturday very early, driving from Cambridge, MA to the zoo at 8:00 AM! When we arrived at the zoo, we headed for the Roots & Shoots tent, where each of the groups had its own table to show others the project they are working on. Some groups were learning more about endangered whales, specifically the Right Whale; others have been doing fundraisers to raise money for different causes related to helping animals or people or the environment, which are the three goals of Roots & Shoots. We came up with nicknames for a few of the groups; The Whale Group 1, The Whale Group 2 and GGOD, which stood for “Go Green Or Die.”

The project we exhibited was not about whales, homeless shelters, or parrots in Guyana. Instead, it was about a book we wrote called “Energy Lite” that describes why and how families – parents and kids – can use Kill A Watt meters in their homes to learn about ways to conserve energy use and pay less for energy bills. We came up with some fun experiments that parents and kids can do together. To demonstrate some of them, at our table we had hairdryer plugged into a Kill A Watt meter as well as a toaster oven.

In the toaster oven, we baked chocolate chip cookies, which lured people to our table with the delicious smell of baking cookies. And when they got there we’d show them how much energy these appliances use! They were always amazed, and a lot of them told us they would let their hair dry without using a hairdryer – now that they knew how much energy it uses.

Many people were very amazed at what we had done in writing this book, and they congratulated us on our accomplishments. We also explained about our book – along with a Kill A Watt – will be available soon in all of the Cambridge Public Libraries so that people can take the book and the meter home, just like they’d check out a book or a CD.

When people told us that enjoyed our project, we gave them one of the Sprouts of

Hope business cards that I designed. It has our blog’s Web address on it, so we are hoping more people will come to read what we write about what the Sprouts of Hope do. Some people even wanted to know if our books were on sale. Unfortunately, they’re not, at this time, but we hope to sell them in the future!

Each Roots & Shoots group got a chance to go on the stage and present their projects to Dr. Jane, as she tells us to call her. She sat in the front row and really enjoyed learning about what we are doing to change the world. Eliza spoke about our “Energy Lite” book project, as the rest of the Sprouts went up on stage to help show big photographs of pages from our book.

We are so grateful to Dr. Jane for writing her words of encouragement and support about our project, and now her words are on our book’s back cover. It was amazing for us read what she said about our effort: “The Sprouts of Hope have come up with such a simple idea that can make such a very big difference.”

After our presentation, we handed a copy of “Energy Lite” to Dr. Jane that each of us had signed – as its authors.

During the rest of the day we explained our project again and again to people. First to Roots & Shoots people, then to the public, who came by our table on the way to getting Dr. Jane to sign one of her books that they’d purchased.

Dr. Jane signed a copy of her new book, "Hope for Animals and Their World," for each of

us, and here is the message she wrote for us:

“Follow your dream. Jane Goodall.”

Dr. Jane must have been much more exhausted than we were! She continued to sign books until 7:00 that night—and she had started at about 2:00 in the afternoon! Wow!

We all had a very fun time at the zoo. It was great fun to meet Dr. Jane (again!), to look at all the adorable animals, and to spread our knowledge of Kill A Watt meters to others! This day was truly one of the best Roots & Shoots events we have attended. With all the excitement, teaching and demonstrating, how could we not love it?

A Leadership Summit with Dr. Jane

By Lilly

On Sunday, May 2, an invited group of New England Roots & Shoots members gathered at the Lenox Hotel in Boston – an environmentally friendly hotel – for a Leadership Summit with Dr. Jane Goodall. Dr. Jane told us a bit about the history of Roots & Shoots, including that next year will be its 20-year anniversary. She also had encouraging words for us as she spoke about how Roots & Shoots is affecting young people everywhere.

Dr. Jane told us that she has often run into young people who feel hopeless, as though there is nothing they can do to make things better for animals and people and the environment. She believes that Roots & Shoots is spreading hope and enthusiasm – and she described us as being “ambassadors” for Roots & Shoots, as we spread the word through what we do about the ways that kids are truly making a positive difference and bringing about change – sometimes in ways that then spur adults to act.

All of us sat in a big circle and we talked for a long time about local issues and global change.

Some Roots & Shoots members talked about the apathy they see on their campus and about the lack of knowledge a lot of their peers have when it comes to environmental issues. Others talked about situations involving violence and what they are doing to try to stop it.

We also discussed ideas for an upcoming global Roots & Shoots campaign that will focus on endangered species and climate change. Roots & Shoots members suggested ways to reach out to people in their community and get them interested in learning more about how these topics are connected. We exchanged some interesting comments about “cute” and “not cute” animals that are being affect ed by climate change, and how these animals can be used as part of the campaign.

Our discussion ended with a look back and a look forward. Stories of success were shared and next steps were talked about. It was really inspiring to hear all the things these people have done to make the world a better place. One group told about their success creating a Roots & Shoots group in a low-income area with a lot of violence. We shared our success with getting a pilot composting program into our school – and our work ahead to convince other schools to do composting in their cafeterias.

One of the Roots & Shoots displays at this event was also about composting; kids at the Cotting School -- with whom the Harvard Roots & Shoots group is involved -- brought samples from different stages of the composting process to show how it actually happens.

We had a chance to ask Dr. Jane questions about her work, and a lot of

kids told her about the ways she had inspired them. It was amazing to see how much Dr. Jane has taught us all and to think about how we have all changed by being in Roots & Shoots.

Spreading the Word About Roots & Shoots

By Risa

On Monday night., May 3, Eliza, Maya, Kaya and I participated in an event at the Currier House at Harvard University. It was an opportunity for those who have supported Roots & Shoots to visit with Dr. Jane. We were invited to show these guests our project and to share with them how Roots and Shoots has a positive impact on our lives.

We set up an exhibit on a table with the book we wrote – “Energy Lite,” posters with big photos of pages from our book and a Kill A Watt meter. People seemed to be genuinely interested in our project, and we were delighted to share with them what we’ve accomplished.

Everyone sat down to hear Dr. Jane Goodall speak. She talked about the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) and Roots & Shoots. She spoke about her experiences starting various programs, working with kids, and of course about the chimps she studied for so many years in Africa! After Dr. Jane spoke, Eliza and I told the people about our experiences in Roots & Shoots.

Following Dr. Jane wasn’t easy, but we tried. We shared an overview of what we’ve accomplished over the years, and talked more specifically about our most recent project “Energy Lite.” We also spoke about how Roots & Shoots has motivated and encouraged us to do projects like this in our local community and at our school.

Without Roots & Shoots, The Sprouts of Hope would not have been formed and we would not have been able to make a difference as we have. Our motto is "Have a Dream. Make a Difference," and without Roots & Shoots, we might not have acted on our dreams.

An Evening at Harvard with Dr. Jane Goodall

By Maya

On May 3, after our event at Harvard’s Currier House, the Sprouts of Hope traveled to Harvard’s Sanders Theater for another event with Dr. Jane. It began, her events usually do, with a very long applause from the audience, followed by a pant-hoot, which is the sound that chimpanzees make when they are excited. We’ve learned how to do it from Dr. Jane, whose pant-hoot is simply amazing to hear.

We listened as Dr. Jane and Harvard Professor Richard Wrangham, who worked for three years with Dr. Jane in Gombe, talk about what she’d learned about chimpanzees. It was 50 years ago that Dr. Jane arrived for the first time on the shores of Lake Tanganhika to begin her research on chimpanzees. We learned about the project called Takari, which means “take care,” and what it was doing to help the wild animals in the forest and the people in the nearby communities. We heard many inspiring stories from Dr. Jane about her experiences in Gombe.

We also heard the story of Mr. H, who of course spent the night sitting on the table besides Dr. Jane.

After their conversation and questions from the audience, Sally Sharp Lehman introduced the Sprouts of Hope and asked us to come to the stage. I gave short talk about what the Sprouts are doing and told the audience about our book project, “Energy Lite.” Here is some of what I said:

"Thank you, Dr. Jane, for giving us the confidence to believe that what we do can make a difference. We now know we can. And like those ROOTS that push rocks aside to become SHOOTS, we now know that nothing is impossible to accomplish."

Our friend, Abby Schoenberg, who is a member of the Harvard Roots & Shoots group, also gave a great speech about their projects and her love since childhood for Dr. Jane and Roots & Shoots.

Although the Sprouts have had the amazing opportunity to meet Dr. Jane in the past, I think that each time is more special then the last. This was a very wonderful and inspiring night. As we left Sanders Theater many people who we didn’t know came up to us to say congratulations. Later, I heard that Dr. Jane and Professor Wrangham spent the rest of the night signing their books!

Sprouts of Hope: Donating Socks to Help the Homeless

2010-04-25T17:51:00.000-07:00

Inspired By Stories about Homeless People and Their Health Care

By Eliza

Last month, the Sprouts participated in a sock drive to benefit the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program (BHCHP). BHCHP is an organization that works to provide the highest quality health care possible for homeless people in Boston. Every year during the month of March, BHCHP collects socks for homeless people. Socks can reduce the risk of skin infections, prevent frostbite, and foster good hygiene. Socks help people stay clean, warm, and healthy. Many homeless and poor people do not have access to clean socks.

We pitched in to help homeless and needy people in Boston by collecting socks from our families and friends, at our synagogues and after-school activities, and with the help of the Brotes de Esperanza. On Saturday, April 10, we visited BHCHP to deliver the pairs of socks that people contributed when we asked for donations and to learn about how those who are homeless get medical care in Boston.

We met with Dr. Jim O’Connell who started BHCHP and has been directing the program for the 25 years since it began. He showed us around the building, which is across the street from Boston Medical Center and was used as an ambulance garage and morgue before BHCHP raised more than $40 million to rebuild it to serve the needs of these homeless patients.

We learned many things about BHCHP from Dr. Jim. Boston Health Care for the Homeless gives medical, dental and behavioral health care to homeless and poor people in Boston. They also offer health services at more than 80 homeless shelters throughout the Boston area. They run free daily walk-in clinics at their main building, and they work to educate and employ their patients.

BHCHP also devotes two of its floors in this building to hospital rooms. This is where homeless people can stay if they are too sick to live and sleep outside or in a shelter and are not able to be admitted to an actual hospital. This “hospital” has more than 100 beds where homeless people stay while they receive treatment from doctors, dentists, and therapists. All of its beds are usually occupied. It is great that this facility exists, but is not big enough. There are so many homeless people in Boston who need this kind of in-patient care; what often happens is that when someone who is very sick needs a bed here, another person who has been treated there has to leave. This can be a hard transition since many of these patients have to return to living on the street or traveling by bus to shelters.

Our trip was very inspiring. It is crazy how many homeless people suffer in our community, and it is even crazier that people don’t care about them when they get sick. As citizens of Massachusetts, the U.S.A, and even the whole planet, it is our job to make sure that homeless people -- not only in Boston, but everywhere else, too – get the basic human right of health care that they are entitled to.

It felt wonderful for us to be able to leave behind hundreds of pairs of socks that people had donated in our effort to be a part of this sock drive.

Visit www.bhchp.org for more about Boston Health Care for the Homeless.

Sprouts of Hope: Writing a Book For Kids and Families

2010-03-07T06:16:00.000-08:00

Energy Lite: Using Kill A Watt Meters to Reduce Energy Use

By The Sprouts of Hope

Last April the Sprouts of Hope organized an exhibit for the Cambridge Science Festival, and we used our exhibit to help kids understand more about energy, how we use it and how we can find out how much energy we use in our homes. We showed parents and kids how a Smart Meter works; it measures energy use in our entire house. And we had set up a display with Kill A Watt meters that showed how much energy is saved by using fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) instead of incandescent ones.

A Kill A Watt meter is monitor that tells you exactly how much electrical power an appliance in your home is using. Using it can help you cut down on your carbon footprint.

So, when we plugged a hairdryer into one of our Kill A Watt meters at the exhibit and turned it up to high, the grown-ups and kids couldn't believe how much energy it took to dry their hair. A lot of them told us that they would never dry their hair again!!

This is when we first had the idea of writing a book for kids and parents about using Kill A Watt meters at home. If they had a book and a Kill A Watt meter, parents could find ways to reduce their energy bills and kids could learn about how much energy is consumed by the things they use everyday. And when they find out how much energy they are using, we thought they'd use these things less often or in more efficient ways.

Actually, the idea of writing such a book -- and donating the book and a Kill A Watt meter to the Cambridge Public Library system -- was suggested to us by John Tagiuri. He's a great friend of the Sprouts and had helped us to set up our Cambridge Science Festival exhibit. He'd also taken photographs of us as the Statue of Liberty holding a CFL bulb. [Here's a picture Melissa took of us when John was taking photos of us.]

This fall we started working on Energy Lite, the book we've now written. And while you might think that the topic of Kill A Meters might be a boring subject to write about, it turned out to be a lot of fun, especially when John took pictures of us doing the experiments that we write about in the book. It took us a while to come up with how we'd tell a good story about Kill A Meters and also the best ways to describe what they are and how parents and kids could use them. To figure this out, we brainstormed ideas and then we wrote our ideas on pieces of paper -- describing what we might include on each of these pages.

Then we spread these pages on the floor and rearranged them until we figured out the best order for them in the book. And that's

how our book came to life. We didn't include everything in it that we first thought we would, and as we went along we changed our minds about drawing pictures to go along with our words -- even after we'd already drawn quite a few pictures. [You can see what one of our early page designs looked like.] That's when we decided to use photographs.

Each of the Sprouts was responsible for thinking about and writing two of the pages -- and Maya worked on drawing the cover.

After several meetings, when we reviewed what we'd written and drawn, we'd do the same thing all over again; we'd put our pages on the floor and see how they fit together. And as we wrote more words and thought more about the images to go with them, we started to read them out loud to each other to see if what we'd written made sense. We also wanted to be sure that we were also telling a good story.

Then it was time for our photo shoot with John, who is an amazing photographer and such a great partner with the Sprouts of Hope. We had ideas about what pictures we wanted to use on various pages, so we spent a couple of hours taking ones of all of us using the Kill A Watt meter with different appliances -- a hairdryer, of course, a laptop computer, a toaster over and the light bulbs.

We printed all of photographs that John took and then we became photo editors and selected the ones that we wanted to use in the book. That's when Melissa, who mentors the Sprouts of Hope, took our words and images and worked with her friend, Lois Fiore, who designed the book on her computer.

Now that we are done writing and editing the book, we are going to meet with the director of the Cambridge Public Library system to talk about donating our book and Kill A Watt meters to the main library and to all of its branches. We want families to be able to check it out -- just like they'd check out a book or a DVD from the library. We are trying to figure out how we can get it printed. And we also want to figure out how to spread the word about this book so that maybe other kids will want to write one for their library. It would be wonderful to create a kind of Kill A Watt library all over the country -- and then in cyberspace, too.

Once our book is in the library, we will encourage other people to make similar books and spread the word about conserving energy!

Sprouts of Hope: Passing Down What We've Learned

2010-01-20T13:23:00.000-08:00

From Sprouts To Brotes

By Eliza

My Bat Mitzvah is in March. For my community service project, my Sprouts of Hope sisters and I are putting the idea behind Roots & Shoots/New England’s Sprouts of Hope fund into action! The Sprouts Of Hope Fund offers a way for people to donate money to help start Roots & Shoots’ groups in low-income and poor schools and communities. As the Sprouts of Hope, we contribute each year from our fundraising activities. [If you want to donate, check out The Sprouts of Hope Fund section on the right side of our blog. We did a cool video to tell why we think it’s such a great way to help other kids, and we put it on YouTube. Click on the link to take a look and listen.]

With my bat mitzvah project, however, we are helping to start a group in a different way. At a bilingual school in Cambridge, MA called Amigos a group of second graders recently joined Roots & Shoots. They named themselves after us - "Brotes de Esperanza," which is Spanish for "Sprouts of Hope." One day each month, I and two other members of The Sprouts of Hope volunteer by doing fun projects with the Brotes. We plan and lead their lessons and projects with the help of a Roots & Shoots intern and a parent of one of the Brotes.

The first time we went to Amigos was on a Wednesday in late October. We helped the Brotes make collages about the environment and then made Halloween decorations and toys out of recycled materials. We talked a little bit about global warming and how to have a "Green Halloween," since they were going to dress up the next week as either a princess or a ninja.

Then we discussed Waste-Free lunches. We'd brought in the many posters, photos, lunch trays, water bottles, and utensils that we collected and saved from our Waste-Free lunch project at our school.

We also introduced them to what we call the 6 R's (rethink, renew, reduce, reuse, recycle, and rot) and explained to them why waste-free lunches are good for the environment. We passed around water bottles, trays, containers, and utensils, some of which were reusable and some of which weren't.

They got really excited when we talked about reusable lunch boxes and they all jumped up and ran to get their lunch boxes. They were also very excited about sorting through the photographs we brought that showed different ways of packaging food. Using the photos as illustrations, we debated whether a six-pack of small soda cans was better or worse for the environment than drinking soda from one bigger bottle. The kids were very smart and knew a lot about waste-free lunches and the environment. One kid even had a solar panel on her roof at home!

The next month we went there, the kids celebrated autumn by making recycled bookmarks out of leaves. Also, in honor of Thanksgiving, they all wrote something that they were thankful for on a leaf and then they strung their leaves on a homemade paper tree. During that visit we talked with them about composting and discussed why it is good for the environment. (Since we do composting at our school and have visited the composting farm where our food waste is taken, we had a lot of stories to share with them.)

We let them touch some real compost with worms in it! They loved the worms especially. They colored in posters that we designed for an event we did in October, the City Sprouts festival, where we celebrated our school gardens. The posters said in big bubble letters "WE WANT COMPOST AT OUR SCHOOL!" They colored in the posters and planned to hang them up in the halls of their school so they could convince their principal, teachers and students to get composting going in their cafeteria.

We have done so many fun projects with the Brotes. One month, we taught them about bottled water. We introduced them to Think Outside The Bottle, the international anti-bottled water campaign. We also let them do a blind taste test between bottled and tap water.

A different month, we talked about homelessness. The Brotes all brought socks to their meeting to donate to our sock drive to benefit Boston Health Care for the Homeless (www.bhchp.org).

Among other things, the Brotes have learned about endangered species and watersheds.

One month, when we focused on recycling, we even got to make recycled paper with them (out of old newspapers)! It was really fun!

So far, working with the Brotes has been fun and educational for the Sprouts. The Brotes are very smart. They know more about global warming and the environment than a lot of adults. I hope that our partnership with the Brotes will continue, even though my Bat Mitzvah will soon be over. It's been fun and amazing to share our Roots & Shoots experiences with these kids -- taking what we've learned and passing it down to them: from Sprouts to Brotes.

Sprouts of Hope: New England Roots & Shoots Youth Summit

2009-11-24T14:16:00.000-08:00

Learning Why To Use Reusable Water Bottles

By Eve

On Saturday, November 14 the Sprouts of Hope went to the annual Roots & Shoots Youth Summit in Boston. At the start, Sally Sharp Lehman, who directs the New England chapter of Roots & Shoots, talked about the Jane Goodall Institute, specifically its Africa program and how it is working and planning to take care of more and more orphaned chimpanzees.

Awards were also presented to regional Roots & Shoots groups as a way of showing appreciation for the efforts they made during the year. For the second year in a row the Sprouts of Hope were recognized as the “outstanding group” in the New England region, and this year our adult leader, Melissa, was named the region’s “Outstanding Group Leader.”

Throughout the rest of the day, we went to our various workshops. And during the lunch break, John Taguiri, a photographer and artist who has partnered a lot with us on projects, took photos of all of the kids who came to the Youth Summit.

John set it up a mini-photo studio at the summit so the people would be shown kicking away plastic water bottles while holding a reusable water bottle. And they would be standing on top of the world. It looked really cool. You can see what it looked like when Lilly posed for the picture.

Lilly, Eliza, Risa, and I went to a workshop called “Drop of Hope - Bottled Water and Our Public Water System.” This workshop inspired me to not drink bottled water. We learned that all bottled water is really just tap water that is purified. Then, it is sold for around $1.75 a bottle, when you could be getting almost the same water for a few cents at home. But when you are drinking water at home, you aren't putting plastic into the landfills, or the ocean.

There is a giant island of trash in the Pacific Ocean called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It is an island of floating plastic and debris that is two times the size of Texas. It is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean right now, but it's heading toward Hawaii. Since it is in the middle of the ocean, it's nobody’s property, so it's nobody's responsibility to clean it up. About 86% of plastic bottles go into the landfills or the ocean. Only 14% are recycled. Here’s a link to a slideshow about this enormous Great Pacific Garbage Patch:

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/11/09/science/11102009_Garbage_index.html

And there is a Web site, http://www.greatgarbagepatch.org/ where you can learn more this ocean garbage patch and also about ways to make people aware of how to stop producing so much garbage by throwing away so many plastic bottles.

We also learned about the water that gets sold in plastic bottles and how companies get it. Usually companies go into small towns that can’t afford to or aren’t strong enough to push them out. Sometimes there will be many days when the water supply for the citizens runs out, while the water factories are still pumping water out of the ground. Then, they bottle it up, which takes a lot of energy, and ship it to stores, which also requires energy, and then they sell it.

The main problem of bottled water, though, is the water itself. The people who spoke to us said that the bottles send chemicals into the water when you leave water in the bottle too long or when you reuse the bottles. Also, we were told that only one person checks the clean-ness of these companies’ water; she has other jobs, too, which means that her mind isn’t even fully into the job. As for tap water from your homes, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – along with local water departments, like ours in Cambridge, MA – oversees keeping the public water supply healthy. If the Food and Drug Administration – the government agency that checks bottled water – finds anything in this water, the company of the dirty water just has to slip it off the shelf. They don't have to tell anyone. Also, any plastic that goes into the ocean can be eaten by fish, then we catch the fish, and we eat the fish along with any plastic that is in the fish.

Of course, I am just reporting what we were told in this workshop. We should do our own research and see what we find out about the business of putting water into plastic bottles. To learn more about the bottled water, you can go to www.empowerbrown.org/blog/ to find out what students at Brown University are doing to try to help the environment on their campus by trying to get students there to stop drinking water out of plastic bottles. Or you can go to dropofhopenews.blogspot.com for information and news about water, especially bottled water.

Even if you don't have time to do any research, you can at least go out and buy a reusable water bottle. They might be expensive to buy, but in the long run using one will save you money and your health.

Toward the end of the day the Sprouts (except for Maya, who went to a workshop about the treatment of greyhounds) went to a panel where Lilly and Kaya talked about things we are doing to try to help people save energy and help the earth. And we learned from others who talked about projects like working to make the roof of their school building green and going to the statehouse to meet with legislators about global warming.

Watch and listen on YouTube to Lilly and Kaya talk about some of the Sprouts’ energy-saving projects.

http://www.youtube.com/user/sproutsoh7#p/a/u/0/Jujz2WFELnQ

It was a very inspiring day for all of us who were at the Youth Summit.

And remember, think outside the bottle!!

Sprouts of Hope: Kids and Environmental Issues

2009-11-23T17:00:00.000-08:00

Telling Others About What We Do

By Lilly

My Uncle Ben teaches a college class at Lesley University about teaching. In mid-November, he asked me to come speak about the environmental activities I have participated in throughout my life so his students could learn about how kids get involved with environmental issues. This was not a Sprouts of Hope event, but many of the things I talked about had to do with the Sprouts.

While a lot of what the Sprouts do is related to the environment, sometimes we do projects that help other people -- like when we went to a Mission Hill School as part of a Roots & Shoots service project on Martin Luther King, Jr. day earlier this year. There we spent time cleaning a classroom, as you can see in this photo.

At Lesley, my uncle's class was small, but the students had lots of questions. They wanted to know how I got interested in doing these kinds of activities and hear about the recent projects I have done, and many other things. I told them about our Kill-A-Watt project -- which is a book the Sprouts are creating to help kids and their parents use a Kill-A-Watt meter to find out how to save energy in their homes. We are planning on putting our book and a Kill-A-Watt meter together in packets and donating them to the Cambridge Public Library. Then, families can borrow this kit just like they borrow books.

You can see some of the drawings we are thinking about using on this book's cover.

I also told this class about the 2nd grade Roots & Shoots group we are helping at another Cambridge public school. And I let them know about how the Sprouts were involved with getting the composting program started at our school. And we are trying to get other schools in Cambridge interested in doing composting in their cafeterias.

I came away from this event realizing how much we have all done in the past few years! It made me feel really good about myself and our group and all the work we have done.

Sprouts of Hope: Keeping A River Healthy

2009-10-31T05:47:00.000-07:00

Cleaning Up Along the Mystic River

By Maya

On Sunday, October 4th, two members of the Sprouts of Hope – me and Eliza – participated in the Roots & Shoots’ Mystic River clean up. Cambridge, the city where we live, is part of the the river's watershed, so it was fun to be doing something that helps the river and our community.

When we started, Beth Meserve, who works with MyRWA (the Mystic River Watershed Association) told us about efforts to keep the river clean and then showed us how she tests the water for various things. In one test, we used PH strips to find out the acidity of the river’s water. We did other tests on water samples to learn about the levels of nutrients and bacteria in the water. She also told us about how volunteers have been collecting water samples every month at 15 locations along the Mystic River -- and testing them -- since 2000. (You can learn more about how MyRWA keeps the river healthy at http://www.mysticriver.org/criver.org/.)

Watch and listen -- on YouTube -- as Beth tells us about taking care of the river and Eliza and I do some tests.

http://www.youtube.com/user/sproutsoh7#p/a/u/0/ZpxXMmdN5KQ

The water turned out to be pretty clean and healthy, but there was still a lot of trash in and around the river -- and that was what we wanted to clean up. When trash falls into the river, it contributes to make the river less healthy.

We put on boots and gloves grabbed some trash bags and headed of to start the clean up. We found a lot of trash on the streets and parks, so we ended up cleaning more than just the river.

There were bottles, paper, cigarettes, glass, empty bags of chips, toys, wrappers, straws, cans, and even a tire stuck in the ground. One person found a bike at the bottom of the river. When the clean-up was over, we had so many trash bags filled with trash. We ate donuts and muffins until all the clean-up groups returned.

Then each of us wrote a sentence on a strip of paper about why we were here or what the river means to us. Eliza wrote: "I came because rivers are important." And I wrote that "I hope this river will always be clean." We did this activity so we could help the river and so others could learn about why the Mystic River is so special and why it should be kept clean.

Some people in the neighborhood thanked us for cleaning up their river, and if felt good to help. I hope that the Sprouts can do another river clean up sometime.

Sprouts of Hope Share Lessons About Composting

2009-10-13T16:24:00.000-07:00

Celebrating School Gardens, Talking about Compost

By Risa

On Saturday, October 3rd, the Sprouts of Hope participated in the City Sprouts School Garden Celebration. The event was a little slow starting because it was raining so hard, and all of the exhibits had to be set up inside instead of outside as we’d hoped. Once the celebration got going, it was a lot fun.

We were asked to represent our school, King Open, which last year became the first school in Cambridge to do school-wide composting in the cafeteria as a part of the Department of Public Works’ Food to Flowers program. So we designed activities for kids that would educate them about composting, in general and at our school.

One activity gave kids the chance to sort what can and can't be composted. We had three colored baskets, and each of us had drawn two things – either food or utensils or other things related to eating – and we’d laminated them so kids could decide which basket to put them in. The baskets were labeled as what can be composted at home, what can be composted at school, and what can't be composted. The point of the activity was to help the kids understand what can be composted in different situations.

We also created a big bubble-lettered page for kids to color. It said:

We want composting at our school.

We're hoping they take these colorful posters to their schools and put them on the walls so that everyone there starts thinking about wanting to have composting happen at their school. The kids really enjoyed coloring, and they – and their parents – seemed enthusiastic about the idea of composting.

Dr. Jeffrey Young, who is the Superintendent of the Cambridge Public Schools, stopped by at our table. We sent him an invitation so we were really glad he decided to come. Since he’s in his first year in Cambridge, we told him in our invitation about how the Sprouts of Hope had testified at the school committee about replacing polystyrene trays because they are bad for the environment. And we let him know how talking about the trays then led to our school, King Open, becoming the pilot program for composting in school cafeterias in Cambridge. He seemed to like the idea of composting at schools in Cambridge and was glad to hear that we were making it work so well in King Open.

At one point Fred Fantini, who is a member of the Cambridge School Committee and one of the people who supports our effort to make the school cafeterias more eco-friendly, stopped by to our table. And some of the Sprouts had their picture taken with him and with Christine Ellersick, who works at the New England Roots & Shoots organization and is always ready to help us.

We also showed the kids and parents who came to visit our table where the food waste from our school's cafeteria goes to be turned into compost.

Even though it rained and we had to be inside, the City Sprouts celebration was lots of fun and we hope we convinced a lot of kids – and parents – in Cambridge to want to start doing composting at their school. For kids at King Open, it’s now just part of what we do. And that’s cool because we’re helping the earth by using our food waste to make really good soil with the things we might otherwise throw away.

Compost: From Our School Cafeteria to the Farm

2009-10-06T17:04:00.000-07:00

Seeing How Composting Works -- Up Close and Personal

By Eliza

On a weekday afternoon in September, the Sprouts of Hope went on an exciting but smelly field trip. We travelled by car to visit the compost farm where our school's food waste goes after we sort it into barrels in our cafeteria. Meryl Brott, who works in recycling at the Department of Public Works in Cambridge and helped us get our composting program going at King Open, arranged our visit and came with us to the farm.

The compost farm is located in Hamilton, Massachusetts, which is northeast of Cambridge, and it has been running for more than 20 years. The farmer, Nate, was kind enough to give us a very detailed and informative tour of the compost farm.

Here is something new that we learned on our visit:

15 years ago, this compost farm produced 60 cubic yards of compost a year. Now, it produces 25,000 each year. We figured out that means that in 15 years there has been a 415.66 percent increase in how many cubic yards of compost are created per year!

At the farm, they use bulldozers to mix around the compost. They have a big workshop where they keep all of their diggers and materials. There are huge piles of compost outside, but there are also huge buildings filled with indoor compost. One building was entirely filled with a kind of compost called “enhanced loam,” which is a compost/topsoil mix used to grow grass. Its quality is so high that it costs $30 per cubic yard, which is really expensive! Another type of compost that the farm makes is a mixture good for gardening that they call Sweet Peet. Sweet Peet is a composted, aged horse manure similar to mulch.

We drove out in the farmer’s truck to the back part of the farm where a lot of the composting takes place. Most of the compost piles are set in windrows, which are long rows of compost that provide more air and oxygen so that the composting happens faster and the piles are less likely to catch on fire.

Nate carried a huge and very long thermometer with him and every once in a while he’d stick it in one of the piles and show us the heat being generated from the compost pile. Often the thermometer would tell us that on the inside of the pile the temperature was pretty high. [This photo shows the thermometer when it first was put into the pile, and then we'd watch the needle move as the temperature got hotter.] It’s the heat and energy generated by the composting that helps to move the process along. Sometimes we'd see steam coming out of the piles.

The compost farm staff constantly use big machines and diggers to flip the windrows. There are four or five of them next to each other, with space in between to make the flipping easier. These piles take four to five months to fully turn into nutrient rich dirt. Once the compost makes it through its last windrow, it goes into this huge green machine that does the final processing. From there, it heads up, up, up, until it gets tossed out on to the top of the pile that is the final product.

We also found some items -- a plastic shoe and a noncompostable fork -- that should not have been put into the compost stream in the first place.

The most important thing we learned, though, is how important it is to compost whatever can be composted. Before the trip, we didn't know that it costs half as much money in the long run to compost food and yard waste than to send this waste to a landfill where they will rot the “wrong” way. People are paying a lot of money to throw food and yard waste (since these are the two largest types of waste that could be composted) into landfills when they could be saving nearly twice as much money by composting them. This would turn their waste into something useful, produce really good dirt that others can use to grow things, and help to save the earth.

Cambridge Science Festival: The Sprouts of Hope Exhibit

2009-05-17T09:23:00.000-07:00

Spreading the Word: Energy Efficiency

By Lilly

On a Saturday at the end of April, the Sprouts of Hope had an exhibit in the Cambridge Science Festival. It was designed to educate people – adults and kids – about energy and how to use it efficiently and save money and the planet by doing so.

As part of our display, we used Kill-A-Watt meters to show how much energy different appliances use. With the help of John Taguiri, who also photographed us posing as the Statue of Liberty holding as the torch an energy-efficient CFL light bulbs, we set up an interactive exhibit so we could easily compare the energy use of fluorescent lightbulbs to regular ones. When people stopped by, we’d ask them to guess how many CFLs it would take to equal the energy used by one incandescent bulb. And then we’d show them. Often they were surprised by what they saw.

Also, by cooking chocolate chip cookies – that were snapped up by hungry kids whenever they were cooked – in a toaster over, we were able to demonstrate how much energy it uses to do things like cooking. The biggest hit, however, was a hair dryer; we plugged it in and turned it on high and people were amazed at how much energy it uses. As they saw the Kill-A-Watt meter leap to more than 1,000 on its register, a lot of them said they’d think twice about drying their hair that way.

We also created a cool patchwork quilt. Each of us made drawings of various renewable energy sources. We put those drawings on a piece of green felt and those patches were placed on it. This quilt hung behind our exhibit. We also put a bit of information about these forms of renewable energy on matching felt pieces; when kids came to our table, they could see what form of energy they wanted to learn more about and match it with the colored felt piece that had the information on it. Let me share one example:

On our quilt, we had a picture on a light purple piece of felt that showed what it looks like to heat a building using Geothermal Energy. On the matching felt patch, we wrote: Geothermal heat pumps use the temperature underground as a source of energy. They use 25 to 50 percent less electricity than conventional heating.

Other pictures and words told about bike riding and solar energy, wind energy and how to charge your cell phone in a way that saves energy. (Unplug the charger when you aren’t using it.)

In the other half of our display, we held an “educational” raffle. For a child to get a raffle ticket, they had to play a quick game in which they answered a few multiple choice questions about energy. The game they did depended on their age. Some used pictures; some had only words. Once they did that, they got to put their ticket in the jar for one of three kids’ prize baskets with a selection on stuffed animals and CDs, that were donated by NStar.

For an adult, to get a raffle ticket, they had to fill out a pledge card sharing ways they said they would work to save energy.

Here are a few examples of what people wrote on these cards that began with the words “I pledge to:”

· Fix my bicycle and start riding it more than driving my car to use less fossil fuels and reduce my carbon footprint.
· Turn off lights that aren’t being used.
· Turn down the water heater.
· Add insulation to walls and attic.
· Continue replacing bulbs with CFLs.
· Keep my air conditioner about 70 degrees or warmer in the summer and at 65 degree in the winter.
· Compost all my food scraps
· Help my grandchildren with good conservation habits early.
· Use less water.
· Shut off TV when no one is watching it.
· Not use the clothes dryer in the summer more than once a week.
· Get a Prius.
· Use less electricity at home and work.

Once they’d made their pledge, they could put their raffle ticket in a jar for one of two energy efficiency kits (donated by NStar and Dominion Energy) or a gift certificate to Greenward, a local environmentally friendly store that has been a great friend and supporter to the Sprouts of Hope. Last year, Greenward also donated a raffle prize when we did a different exhibit at the Cambridge Science Festival. This year, Tags Hardware, another neighborhood store, also lent us a display meter that we used to show people how to set up the Power Cost Monitors to figure out how much energy they are using in their homes, just like we did in our project with NStar.

The festival last for four hours – and this was a very long time for all of us to be talking and explaining things about energy to the many families who stopped by, not to mention keeping track of all of the raffle prize games. Even though there were a lot of us there, it still was tiring to explain again and again to all the new people who stopped by how fluorescent lightbulbs are better for the earth than incandescent bulbs and answer other question about how to use energy more efficiently. But it was worth it when every once in a while, a little kid would go “Hey Mommy! Let's buy the swirly ones instead of the regular ones! They save the earth!”

Climbing Walls, Selling Food

Even before the Cambridge Science Festival ended, we were on our way to MetroRock in Everett, an indoor rock climbing facility where every winter we go to celebrate our time together as Sprouts of Hope. And some of us also taking climbing classes there.

When the folks at MetroRock heard that we do a bake sale/food sale every year to raise money to support causes – local and international – that we believe are a part of the Roots & Shoots mission, they invited us to hold do it during a fundraising climbing event to raise money for cancer research and the Boston-based Jimmy Fund for kids with cancer. So a couple of the Sprouts decided to climb (to raise money for the Jimmy Fund) and we also helped with the bake sale/food sale.

Another wonderful partner of ours, Taza Chocolate, which makes organic chocolate from beans they get in the Dominican Republic through a cooperative farming community and does so in a building very near to our school, donated an assortment of their chocolate bars and we did a raffle for those at MetroRock.

It was fun doing this climb and bake sale – and tiring, after our long day at the festival already. But we raised about $250.00 that night for our effort. By climbing, we also raised money for the Jimmy Fund. These funds, combined with some we’ve raised in different ways, we will give away after we have time to meet and discuss where we’d like the money to go. One place for sure: The Sprouts of Hope Fund to enable kids who don’t have the resources to start a Roots & Shoots group to be able to do so.

Take a look on the right hand column of our blog for more information about the Sprouts of Hope Fund – with a link letting you know how to contribute to it and another link showing us on Facebook with a message to encourage people to donate to this cause. We hope you will.

What Peace Means to Me: A Photography Exhibit

2009-04-18T07:52:00.000-07:00

Seeing What Peace Means to Kids

By Mia

A little while ago, the Sprouts of Hope had the chance to go to the opening of "What Peace Means To Me" at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester. This collection of photographs was taken by Roots & Shoots members who attended a workshop on this project at the Roots & Shoots New England Regional Youth Summit that we went to in the fall. One of the Sprouts, Maya, attended that workshop and she became one of photographers involved with this project. It was fun for us to go with Maya to this event and be able to see her three photographs along with all the others.

Here's a picture of Maya with Banafsheh Ehtemam, who is with the Boston Photography Center and worked with Maya and the other Roots & Shoots kids to create this exhibit.

We were really excited to go to the celebration for this show. It was very interesting to see how each young photographer expressed what peace meant to him or her through their photographs. They wrote words to accompany their pictures, so it was fun to read what they thought about in taking the pictures for this project. The pictures they chose for the exhibit ranged from images in nature to groups of friends to a collection of hands. Each photographer had a different and unique style that was reflected in their pictures and writing.

Maya wrote about her photos, which you can see after her words:

Recess

Recess can be a tough time for kids. Sometimes their friends want to lay with someone else or they start a game and don’t include the others. I wanted to capture moments when little kids show what it feels like to be a friend. To me peace is being a good friend.

After everyone spent time looking at the photographs and talking with some of the kids who took them, we gathered in one of the museum’s rooms for a presentation. Paula Tognarelli, the executive director at the Griffin, told us that she was delighted to have this photography project shown at the museum. Then Banafsheh Ehteman reminded us of the power of art as a way of communicating with people throughout the world. She also let us know that there will be more art and photography projects like this one through Roots & Shoots. Then Sally Sharp Lehman, the director of New England Roots and Shoots, spoke about the New England chapter’s “Peace Through the Arts” campaign through which kids have used artistic expression as a way to send images of peace and hope to children in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

Here’s a video of Banafsheh and Sally telling us about these projects.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQX05l92j-8

We then watched an amazing video celebrating Dr. Jane Goodall’s 75th Birthday. You can see it at: http://vimeo.com/3202137?pg=embed&sec=

To close the ceremony, one of the photographers, Khalifa Stafford, who is a member of the New England Youth Leadership Council, read a poem she’d written to go along with her photographs. Here are some words from her poem:

How can you love anyone,
If your family was never there to teach you
The meaing of love?
Or simply, how to love?

A person who’s never had a family
Must have never experienced happiness.
They must feel lost, or lonely.

When I think of a person at peace,
I think of them as being with their family.
When I think of me at peace,
I see myself with a complete, happy family.

This was a really cool event and another time that we were able to meet and talk with other New England Roots and Shoots groups. It was also another example of how even though we are young we can do great things like have photos end up in a museum.

Sprouts of Hope: Illuminating Energy Efficiency

2009-04-02T10:52:00.000-07:00

Statue of Liberty -- Displaying a Different Torch

By Jane

On a recent night, the Sprouts of Hope did something we hadn’t done in a while. All seven of us got together and did a photo shoot. No, it wasn’t like a photo shoot for a magazine. Yes, it was fun. And yes, it had a specific purpose – to use with our exhibit about energy efficiency that we’re doing at the Cambridge Science Festival on Saturday, April 25.

For the past few months, we’ve been designing our exhibit for this science festival. John Tagiuri, a photographer who cares a lot about energy and environmental issues and partnered with us two years ago at the Cambridge Science Festival, kindly offered to do a photo shoot of us as Statues of Liberty -- only we'd be holding a fluorescent light bulb instead of a torch.

It’s a fun image -- and we had a lot of fun creating it, but it's also meant to illuminate the need to reduce energy use. We hope this image gives people who see it a reason to think more about choosing more efficient ways of using energy, including the appliances they use in their home. By holding up a fluorescent light bulb – and wrapping ourselves in the American flag – we think the photos will catch people’s attention and get them to really think about how they can make energy changes in their daily lives.

John took similar pictures of us as energy-efficient Statues of Liberty a few years ago, and we used those to decorate our exhibit at our science festival that year. Now that we’re older and we’ve added some new Sprouts members, he thought it would be a good idea to do the photo shoot again. And it was fun to be partnering with him again, too; he’s also going to be with us again at the festival this year, helping us demonstrate to people a lot of things about measuring energy use. We’ll probably put the photos John took of us on the wall in back of our exhibit – where a patchwork quilt we are designing with pictures and messages about renewable energy will also hang. Or maybe we’ll tape them to the front or side of our table. We’ll have to see when we get there that day.

It was super fun doing these photos with John. Each of us had the chance to be a Statue of Liberty – and we helped each other to wrap the flag around our body and put the crown on our head. When it was my turn, I didn’t know what was more peculiar – that my robe was an American flag or that the crown on my head was spongy. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was having fun doing this together – and the message we hope our photos will give to those who visit our exhibit.

Here's a Statue of Liberty photo with all of us in it:

We hope you'll come to our exhibit – Smart Energy: Measuring What We Use – on Saturday, April 25th, from noon until 4:00 at Kresge Auditorim at MIT. Check it out by following this link:

http://cambridgesciencefestival.org/2009Festival/ScienceCarnival.aspx

Sprouts of Hope: Greening Our School

2009-03-15T13:37:00.000-07:00

Composting Gets Launched at King Open

By Maya

Two years ago the Sprouts of Hope, a Roots & Shoots group in Cambridge, MA, went to city's school committee to tell them why we thought we should stop having to use polystyrene lunch trays at our school. The members of the committee seemed very interested and listened to what we had to say. We wrote them a thank you note to tell them how much we appreciated them listening to our ideas and asked them again about changing the trays. About a month later, we went back to talk to them again -- and this time we read our thank you note --and then they passed a motion to require the superintendent to look for environmentally friendly alternatives to how we were using the trays in our cafeteria.

The Superintendent created a committee that looked at all the different possibilities -- from using dishwashers in each school to wash reuseable trays to purchasing ones that would be able to turn into compost. After looking at price of compostable trays and evaluating the other options by how they would affect the environment, the committee decided to start a pilot composting program for food waste at our schools. When our school shows that it works, they will start to teach other schools how to do it, and eventually the idea is to be able to eat off of the kind of trays and use the kind of spoons and forks that we can also throw into the compost barrel.

To prepare for the composing program we had meetings after school on Thursdays. Two of the Sprouts of Hope -- Kaya and me -- were able to go to all the meetings, and some of the others went to some of them when they didn't have other activities. There were also three other kids from the afterschool environmental program called Cambridge Can, and one of the custodians at the school who has been helping us with our Waste Free Lunch days.

Here's a picture of two of the Cambridge Can members on our first day of composting.

Our science teacher Donna Peruzzi was always there to help us come up with ideas for how to get other kids really excited about the program. And here's a picture of her using the compost barrel in the cafeteria.

And we worked with Meryl Brott, who is the new recycling director for the city of Cambridge. Then, there was Randi Mail, who directs the city's Department of Public Works, and Jim Maloney, the COO for the Cambridge School Department. At some meetings, people like Jack Mingle, who heads the Cambridge schools' food department, and Jose Wendel and Dawn Olcott from the Cambridge Health Alliance joined us.

You can see pictures of Randi, below on the right, and Meryl, on the left, when they were helping us to do the composting that first day.

It was cool to think that because of what the Sprouts of Hope and two other kids from King Open had said to the school committee, we were now meeting with adults who are in charge of big departments in the school and in the city. And they were asking us for ideas about how to make this happen at our school!!! At one point they asked us to come up with an idea for a composting mascot, and so we talked about it, and then one day I did a pencil drawing of a worm wrapped around an apple core. I sketched the design and gave it to Jack Mingle one night when we went back this fall to talk with the Cambridge School Committee about the composting effort He said he liked it, and before I knew they'd taken my design and made it a cartoon-like mascot!!!

To get every one to feel excited about being the first kids in the city to do a composting program at a school, we planned to do two assemblies; one would be for kids from kindergarten to the 4th grade and the other for 5-8th graders. We planned them for the morning of the day when composting would begin -- our hope was to let all of the kids know what composting is, why it matters that we do it, and how to do it. Then we felt like it was really important to find ways to inspire them to want to do it.

During the assemblies Meryl Brott spoke about how it would work in the cafeteria and she did a great job of explaining how composting helps the environment. (It keeps a lot of waste out of landfills, and when food is put into landfills it gets buried in lots of trash and gives off methane gas which is really bad for global warming.) You can watch a movie we made about the day, and it shows how Meryl explained how composting helps animals -- and the kids loved seeing the animals on the screen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLuD1B3k8g4

The younger kids got to see a slide show that the Sprouts of Hope had made of students at King Open bringing eco-friendly containers and recycling their polystyrene trays during Waste Free Lunch days on days when we tried doing them at our school.

They also got to see Meryl and Randi do a demonstration of how to compost. For the older kids, after Meryl spoke, we showed a fun video that the Cambridge Can kids (you saw Eve and Brianna's picture earlier in the blog entry) made about all the trash we throw away at King Open and showed how easily we could reduce it and why it matters that we do. Next we played an inspiring “Yes We Can” video of President Obama speaking and singers performing that was put together by Will.I.Am. You can watch have fun watching it, too, on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY

After that video played, a picture of “Martin Luther King” came up on the screen and a student, in voice that sounded a bit like his, gave us a message about how proud he was of us for doing something to make a positive difference in the world. (You can hear this on the YouTube movie, too.)

At lunch that day we became the first school in Cambridge to compost at school, and it went REALLY, REALLY well!!!! There were banners and posters in the cafeteria and notices were sent home to let families know it was happening.

The kids poured their liquids into the white bucket, and they put their food into the yellow bucket, trash into the black barrel, and their tray into a big bag that will take them to the place where they get recycled.

Everyone got a sticker saying, “I compost my school lunch because I care.”

We had student monitors who'd been trained to help other students and they got to wear aprons with our mascot on the front. They gave the kids good hints about how to put their waste in the right buckets. My mom took pictures and videos of the kids composting and saying how excited they are about doing this! When you watch the YouTube video about our first day -- you can find the link above -- and you'll get a good sense of how excited everyone was about doing the composting.

I knew that it would go well because the grown-ups in our school -- like Principal Tim -- and those from other places like the Department of Public Works helped us to be sure it did. But I didn’t think that it would go that well!! And Principal Tim said at our assembly how kids can be the ones who have good ideas and why it's important for grown-ups to listen to their ideas and find ways to help to make them happen. This is what happened with this idea -- since it started with kids talking about replacing the trays and ended up with us doing composting as a first step.

Here is a link to a Cambridge Chroncle article about the composting effort at King Open and it tells about how the Sprouts of Hope were involved in making it happen:

http://www.wickedlocal.com/cambridge/news/education/x1098980048/Cambridge-school-aims-to-be-greenest-in-Boston-area

I hope the spirit of composting doesn’t go away so that our pilot program will go smoothly throughout the year. When that happens, then we know it will work at other schools in the future! And when it works at other schools, too, we will be that much closer to being able to replace the polystyrene trays with ones we can toss into the compost -- and that will be a very happy day, too!!

We've also learned that some kids at the Cambridge Rindge & Latin School, our city's high school, have started a Compost Club. From March 2nd through March 6th, some of the club's members, such as Jonah Vorspan-Stein and Eliza Cohen, who went to King Open, moved from table to table to collect food scraps and paper waste. While doing so, they explained to students how composting works and why it's important to do. A story in the school's newspaper says within a year the Compost Club hopes to establish permanent compost bins in the cafeteria and do more trial weeks of composting in the meantime. It also says that the club hopes to have assemblies and presentations about composting. We say "Go For It," and we hope it happens soon at your school, too.

Sprouts of Hope: Telling Our Stories to Adults

2009-03-08T13:46:00.000-07:00

Speaking at the Massachusetts Environmental Education Society Conference

By Kaya

The Sprouts of Hope were extremely happy when Roots & Shoots New England told us we were invited to speak at the MEES conference. MEES stands for Massachusetts Environmental Education Society, and the organizers of its annual conference wanted us to talk about what we’d learned in trying to make our school, King Open in Cambridge, MA more “green” and also about some of our other environmental activities.

Learn more about MEES at: http://massmees.org/

Very early on Wednesday, March 4th (a school day!!) the seven Sprouts of Hope climbed into the car and we drove for about an hour to get to Holy Cross college in Worchester. The ride didn’t seem long because we were talking and listening to music on our Ipods, so it wasn’t a boring ride. We also got to miss the first half of the school day! This made the day even more fun.

There were lots of people who came to this conference, all of them adults; we were the only kids. Also Christine Ellersick, the program manager at the New England chapter of Roots & Shoots was there too, and she helped us provide information about Roots & Shoots to the people who came to hear us speak.

Here's Christine talking about Roots & Shoots -- and that us on the screen behind her.

We had our own room to do our presentation, and Maya and Mia were the Sprouts who talked that morning. [We take turns in speaking at events. ] About 25 adults came to listen because, as they told us, they were curious about how to make their schools greener by doing things like composting or starting a “green” club with the students. There were principals and teachers, even a Spanish teacher, and some who were students at universities. This made us excited and nervous! Principals! Wow!

We prepared a slideshow with pictures of a lot of our activities. We had pictures that show us speaking to the Cambridge School Committee about replacing our polystyrene lunch trays, and the Waste Free Lunch days we did at our school, our exhibit last year at the Cambridge Science festival about waste reduction, and our work in our school’s City Sprouts garden. The music we put with the pictures was from High School Musical; it’s called “We’re All In This Together.” At each seat we placed one of our “6 R’s” cards (you can see what the 6 R card we designed looks like below) and a couple of papers about Roots & Shoots that Christine had brought.

Our Talk

First Maya introduced all of us, and then she told the adults how we prepared for and organized our waste-free lunch days at our school and how we try to live by the six R’s – Rethink, Renew, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Rot – and teach others about how they can live with them, too. She told them about the survey we did in our school when we asked kids at King Open how they packed their lunch and what they did with the waste from it. Then, Maya let them know that normally our school produces 8 or 9 bags of trash per day and how on our waste free lunch days we were able to reduce that number by half. But, she told them, the number always went up again when the waste free lunch day was over. Our goal is to get kids to think about this every day so that the number of cafeteria trash bags can down to 3 each day.

Maya explained that our school can’t yet switch from using the polystyrene trays to using ones we can compost because they cost a lot more and we don't have composting in place. By the time we have our composting program in place, we hope the price of the other trays has dropped. We brought some trays with us – we call the polystyrene one the “bad” tray and the other one “good” – and we passed those around so everyone could see and feel the difference. Mia explained what happens when the trays are recycled. Amazingly, I had some of the little plastic pellets (the ones the polystyrene gets turned into) in my pocket, so we passed those around too. Mia told them that one big problem is that a lot of kids still throw their trays in with the trash so they don’t even get recycled. This means they go into landfills and end up giving off methane gas and that is really bad for global warming.

Mia talked about a lot of the activities that the Sprouts of Hope have done. She describe how each year we raise money so that we can give it away to support other groups doing good things in their communities. And she told them about the two times we’ve done an exhibit on opening day of the Cambridge Science Festival. We are going to another opening day exhibit about energy efficiency at this year’s Cambridge Science Festival on Saturday, April 25. Follow the link, below, to find out more about the festival. It's really fun, and we hope you’ll come to see our exhibit and the others on April 25th:

http://www.cambridgesciencefestival.org/Home.aspx

Maya talked about our current project with NStar. It involves each of us using a Power Cost Monitors and Kilo-watt meter at our home to measure our energy use. She also spoke about a school fundraising project we did with NStar when students like us sold fluorescent light bulbs. When she told a story about how one girl bought 100 bulbs for a “green wedding,” many people laughed and clapped their hands enthusiastically.

Mia then shared some important lessons we’ve learned in the two years we’ve been active in Roots & Shoots as the Sprouts of Hope.

It's important kids understand they should try not to change everything all at the same time.
Teach patience and persistence. It’s a winning combination!
Don’t give up when something doesn’t work for the first time.
Make good partners; include parents, teachers, staff, administrators and city employees.
Help kids learn to document what they do – like this blog we do reminds us of what we’ve accomplished. And kids can use a blog to share their stories and communicate with others about what they’ve done.
Celebrate your successes. Each year, the Sprouts go to an indoor rock climbing wall and we have fun helping each other to climb. And then we eat a cake and celebrate what we’ve done together.
Evaluate how to best spent your limited time and energy.
Be open to serendipity. Like this year when we went rock climbing, the guy who led us invited us to do one of our bake sales at MetroRock when they have a competition.

You can see our panel and listen to one of the teachers who was there talking about our talk on a short video we made:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEWkCY2lZ0U

Maya and Mia spoke wonderfully and answered questions at the end of their presentation. All the adults thanked us for doing such a good job in teaching them about what kids can do and how adults can encourage and support their efforts. Some of them didn’t know what they should do in their green clubs at their schools, so we offered advice. Others want to start a composting program at their school. Since our composting program is starting at our school on March 11th, we could tell them how we are preparing for that big event – with the pep rallies we are doing and how some of the other Cambridge departments, like the Department of Public Works which does the recycling and composting, are helping us to succeed.

When we drove to school, we were happy about how we'd shared what we’ve done and passed along some ideas and lessons learned that we think are helpful. Usually it’s the opposite, adults teach kids, but this time it was kids teaching adults. In the car, we were singing (at times yelling) along with the radio. It was fun to think that we'd taught others and learned a couple of things too at the event, so we were all extremely proud of ourselves. Go Sprouts of Hope!!!!!!

Sprouts of Hope: Climbing In Celebration

2009-02-06T11:27:00.000-08:00

By Risa

Each year, around this time, The Sprouts of Hope go rock climbing. Not outside, but on tall walls inside at MetroRock in Everett, MA. This is our way of celebrating another year of being together since we met as a group for the first time on the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday in 2007. It was because we were thinking about Dr. King and his life that day that we decided to put the words “Have a Dream, Make a Difference” on the t-shirts we designed. On that day we also came up with our name, The Sprouts of Hope.

You can watch a video of us climbing -- and encouraging each other as we climbed -- at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4mOd3hJVt0

Climbing up these walls is really fun, and this was our second year of doing it as a break from our hard work of planning and doing the activities we do in Roots & Shoots. This time was a different experience for us than it was last year when none of us had climbed before. After our first climbing afternoon, some of us decided to take some rock climbing lessons during the year, and Kaya went to camp there during the summer.

Being at different skill levels, however, didn’t effect or take away from the fun we had. It made it even better. This time we got to do more climbs because some of us could belay the others. Last year, we had to depend on Sarah and her assistant, who are instructors at MetroRock, to belay each of us. This year, Bryan helped us, but he didn’t need to belay everyone. We had a lot more fun because we could help each other.

When one of us was up on the wall, you could hear helpful words passed up to them. “Can you reach that one right there? Yeah great job.” We depended on each other to get up the wall, and then we had to also rely on each other to get down, as the person who was holding the rope had to let it out gradually as her friend bounced off the wall coming down.

We have photographs of some of us climbing, some belaying others, and some with us just having fun being there with each other.

After our climbing, we had a small meeting to talk about upcoming projects, like the one we are doing about energy efficiency. Each of us named some kind of energy use that we wanted to measure in our homes, and we’re going to do those experiments and write about them on this blog. During our meeting, we ate amazing cake that Maya and Melissa made and decorated with Sprouts of Hope written on the top. For her hard work and patience, the Sprouts kids and parents gave Melissa a pretty glass plate with a tree on it and we donated money so she can get things we need for our activities, like if she needs to print some fliers.

Going rock climbing with The Sprouts of Hope was really fun. All of us are eager to go together again next year.

Our Day of Community Service: On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

2009-01-26T18:05:00.000-08:00

Volunteering in Room 206

By Lilly

On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in January, The Sprouts of Hope decided to participate in a community service project arranged by the Roots & Shoots group at Northeastern University in Boston. (Sadly, Eliza, Mia and Kaya couldn't join me, Jane, Risa and Maya in this activity.) We were inspired to do this, in part, by a video message Michelle Obama recorded to urge people to get involved in their community by helping others on this special day. You can listen to her message by clicking on this link: http://usaservice.org/page/content/calltoservice/

This national holiday was happening on the day before she became First Lady and she asked people around the country to do something for the community in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., just like she and her husband were planning to do in their new city of Washington, D.C.. So The several members of the Sprouts of Hope, along with other Roots & Shoots members, volunteered at the Mission Hill School in Boston.

When we got to the Mission Hill School, we found out that there were many jobs to be done: making posters encouraging the kids to conserve water, cleaning out classrooms, organizing the library. We chose to clean a combined fourth and fifth grade classroom, and when we first entered the classroom, Room 206, there was a list of things to do.

1. Clean out the work bins
2. Wash down the tables
3. Clean library bins

As it turned out, there were around 30 work bins! So there was a lot of work for us to do.

When the Sprouts had finished the three items on the checklist, we didn't really see very much of a difference. Sure, the room was cleaner, but unless somebody told you we’d been cleaning, if you happened to walk into the room, you might not have noticed the difference. So we kept on cleaning.

I vacuumed the two rugs where we imagined kids sat and read and talked. And we took pillows outside and shook them as a way of cleaning them in the fresh air.

We also organized the really messy coatroom, where it looked like everything that did not have another home ended up being tossed. And we washed some of the windows and the whiteboard, and we swept the hardwood floors with a broom and cleaned things out from underneath tables.

When our work was done, even we were shocked at how different the classroom looked. We wished we could be there to see the teacher’s and students’ reaction when they walked in the next morning.

Want to see us cleaning the classroom? Click on this YouTube link and you can watch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jETzTYljEUw&feature=channel_page

Just as we were preparing to leave, a man walked into the classroom, and then walked back out. Then, with a confused expression, he walked back in. It turns out that this man is the teacher in Room 206. He introduced himself as Nakia, and told us when he first walked in, he thought it was the wrong classroom... that’s how different it looked! It was a really special moment, and seeing his reaction and meeting him made all of our effort worth all our time we’d devoted to doing such a good job.

All of us hope that someday soon we can return to the Mission Hill School and help out again.

Other Projects at Mission Hill School

It was also a lot of fun to meet other Roots & Shoots kids who were there that day. All of us had a chance to eat lunch together and we went around in a circle and each of talked about what we liked about being involved with community service. Everyone talked about how much fun they were having and how good it felt to be helping other people.

We also had a chance to see some of the other projects -- like the ones where kids were making signs about conserving water to be put in the restrooms throughout the school. Some other kids were writing short messages about ways kids can easily -- in 5 minutes -- make a real difference in saving the planet's resources and energy.

You can see some examples of the pictures and signs they were making in the photographs, below, and listen to a video (click on the link that follows) of the Northeastern students who organized the day talking about some of the cool projects that happened at the school.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhrcEhEnL2s&feature=channel_page

The Sprouts of Hope: Getting Rid of Wasteful Energy Use

2009-01-10T09:25:00.000-08:00

Tracking Energy – So We Use Less of It

The Sprouts of Hope welcomed 2009 with a new project, one that we will feature at the Cambridge Science Festival in our presentation on Saturday, April 25. This will be the third year the Sprouts will have had an exhibit as part of the festival's opening day activities. Plan on coming that day and visiting with us and seeing all of the other cool exhibits, too. http://web.mit.edu/museum/programs/festival.html.

Our project is about using in-the-home digital technology to tell us how much energy we are using. These simple-to-use tools can show us not only how much power we are using but how much it is costing us --and by knowing this information we can figure out ways to reduce both. We are doing this project in partnership with NStar; this is the first time that NStar has trained any kids in how to use the combination of Power Cost Monitors – we like to call them “Smart Meters” -- and Kill A Watt Electricity Usage Monitors. (If we do a good job using these tools, then they hope to do a lot of other trainings with kids, so we really hope this works so everyone can learn more about energy use and have fun doing it.)

We learned how to do this when we went to NStar on January 2nd – a visit arranged for us by Mary McCarthy, NStar’s Residential Program Manager, and David MacLellan, who is the technical expert.

He explained how to use the tools they were giving us. Listen to our training on this YouTube video. www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBomVN3D2wE&feature=channel_page

He and Mary also gave us good suggestions about

various things we can do in our homes to try to reduce the amount of energy we use. For example, do you know that it ALWAYS makes sense to turn lights off when you leave a room, no matter how long you are going to be away from it? And shutting down computers when you are through using them is a good idea, too.

Here is a link to a short video that tells you how to install and use a Power Cost Monitor:

http://dom.com/media/video/powercost/index.html

One of the Sprouts decided to write about the ways her family is planning to make small changes in their home so, as a family, they can be more energy efficient. And they will use these tools we got from NStar to see if their changes make a positive difference.

By Eliza

My family is taking part in the Sprouts Energy Efficiency project. This means that we will have to make changes in our daily lives to conserve energy. First we set up the two meters. Part of the Smart Meter goes around our electric meter outside and the other part, which tells us what is happening with our energy use, stays inside. (I'm showing you pictures of the two parts of the Smart Meter here.) The Kill A Watt one always stays inside and we plug things into it to get readings on energy use. After we did this, my mom and dad and two brothers and I had a meeting about all the different ways we could conserve energy.

I found out that we already had Energy Star kitchen appliances, such as our dishwasher, which meant we are conserving a lot of energy in our kitchen. We also have a basement freezer and it wastes a lot of energy. My parents will be looking into ways to either get rid of our basement freezer or use it in a more energy efficient way. Same with our dehumidifier that is in the basement too. Even though it is a crucial device to prevent things like mold, it consumes a lot of energy. Most dehumidifiers are turned on 24 hours a day, every day, and the cost really adds up on our energy bill. We will be looking into Energy Star dehumidifiers because we’d like to save all that energy!

Washing machines and dryers also use a lot of energy. When we tested our dryer using the tools we’d been given, we found out we are paying $0.04 each hour on our energy bill (just to have it plugged in), which is still a lot. When my dad turned on the dryer, the cost went up to 32 cents per hour. As a family of five, we do laundry a lot and use both the washing machine and dryer. I know there are many families out there that wash as many clothes and even more than we do, which means everyone is using all that energy and paying all that money, too.

At the NSTAR meeting, I learned it is most energy efficient when you use settings for laundry load sizes on your washing machine and dryer. So now we always use the different settings. The best option would be to get an Energy Star (or some other eco-friendly) washing machine/dryer but since they are very expensive most families won’t be able to make that change right away.

But there is one change every family can make with light bulbs. My family is changing all of our incandescent light bulbs to compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs). One incandescent bulb costs between $1.44 and $2.40 on each month’s energy bill; a CFL that provides the same amount of light costs between $0.38 and $0.67. I am guessing that in my house we use around 100 lights, and only some are fluorescent. Changing to CFL’s will cut down the energy we use by a lot.

Another thing we’re going to do that will make a huge impact on our energy consumption and on our monthly bill is to use power strips to plug in big energy users like TVs and computers. When you don’t use a power strip, and therefore you JUST press the “off” button on the TV or computer, it still uses electricity. For instance, without power strips the average energy bill will be almost $11.00 for the average TV and in between $5.00 and $22.00 for computers, depending on whether they are in sleep mode or not.

The Sprouts’ goal for this project is to cut down on the energy we use in our homes. This way, we can do our part in conserving the precious energy that humans waste every day and reduce our impact on harming the earth. Hopefully after my family and the rest of Sprouts of Hope try this, we’ll be able to tell others about it and they will try it, too. That is what we are planning to do at the Cambridge Science Festival, and hopefully in other ways, too. Maybe, one day, people throughout the world will be using Smart Meters and everyone will be able to easily find out how much energy they are using and then find ways to reduce. This will help protect the earth and conserve energy, things the Sprouts of Hope – and many, many others – are trying so hard to do. It only takes a few small changes to make a big difference.

Join us at the Cambridge Science Festival – in Kresge Auditorium at MIT -- on Saturday, April 25th from noon until 4:00 and find out what we learned and what you can do in your house to reduce wasteful energy use.

The Flying Peace Dove

2009-01-05T10:48:00.001-08:00

Sprouts of Hope and Boston's First Night Activities and Parade

By Mia

On New Year’s Eve, some of the Sprouts of Hope participated in First Night activities in Boston with Roots & Shoots - New England. In the afternoon, we volunteered at the Roots & Shoots craft table inside the Hynes Auditorium, where a lot of First Night events happen for families during the day. There we helped kids make Peace Doves and write or draw cards with messages of peace for children in Baghdad, Iraq and Nairobi, Kenya. We also cut out the two sides of each Peace Dove after the kids colored them and a paper olive branch and then we assembled the doves on wooden sticks. All the cutting was a little tiring, but it was fun seeing how happy the kids were with their finished Peace Doves or “birds on a stick,” as somebody called them.

You can watch a video of us and the kids making Peace Doves by clicking here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz9K_69U7gc

What we did in the afternoon led up to what we were hoping to do in the big annual First Night parade that Roots & Shoots was going to be a part of. In the parade, we’d carry two giant Peace Doves that others Roots & Shoots kids had helped to make. But with lots of snow and gusty winds and a really cold temperature, we weren’t sure there would be a parade. By late afternoon, the decision was made to go ahead with the parade, and so we put on the layers of clothing we’d brought and got ready to head outside.

We had a banner with the words “Roots & Shoots” and the two big Peace Doves with wings that normally would flap in the wind. I was very excited as we stood getting ready to walk in the parade that would take us up Boylston Street to the Boston Common. A Procession Marshal put Roots & Shoots - New England between a marching band, playing songs like Yankee Doodle real loudly, and kids and grown-ups in an open air circus who were dressed in crazy costumes. Though it was freezing, really cold, and snowing, we could see lots of people looking down from windows of the Hynes Auditorium and waving to us, and ahead of us the streets were lined with people dancing, cheering and blowing horns.

We started marching and the doves looked great blowing in the wind with our banner in front of them. But pretty soon I looked next to me and saw the dove head flying in the wind without the body. We paused to try to put it back on, but the wind was just too strong.

If you want to watch the Peace Dove's head fly off and follow us as we continue marching in the parade, you can watch us on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI_rF5lRuiw

By the time we’d walked a few blocks, the wind had broken both doves and all we had left was the Roots & Shoots banner and the poles and sheets used to make the doves.

And we had the wire basket shaped like a dove’s head that had once been its face. Kaya carried all of this for the rest of the parade. This was all that was left of the doves. But we marched on, holding on to our banner that also blew in the wind. And we had lots of fun anyway. It was a great New Years Eve!

Lunch Trays to Composting

2008-12-22T13:56:00.001-08:00

An Eco-Friendly Project in the Cambridge Public Schools

By Jane

In October 2007, The Sprouts of Hope went to the Cambridge School Committee to speak about a big problem with our school's polystyrene lunch trays. They are harmful to the Earth both in how they are made – from oil – and when they are thrown away, usually in landfills. Some of the trays get recycled, but then they are made into things that end up getting tossed into landfills anyway.

At our school, we decided to make signs to show kids where to recycle the trays; before we did made these signs, most of the kids tossed the polystyrene trays into the regular trash. Now, the signs help; more of the trays at least get recycled, even though they have to be driven to Boston for this to happen.

When we went to the School Committee meeting, each of the Sprouts, along with a few others kids from our school who care about these issues, wrote about why she thought the school committee should do something to replace the polystyrene trays. It turned out that we had to go back a second time about a month later to talk some more about all of this, but on our second visit the members unanimously passed a motion requiring the Superintendent to do research to find an eco- friendly alternative for this tray. Watching them cast this vote made us feel really good.

The Superintendent formed a committee that studied possibilities. They looked at using reusable trays and getting dishwashers to wash them, but that wasn't cost effective and it uses too much water. They could find trays that we could compost but not ones that would come close enough in price to the very inexpensive polystyrene ones. So after studying all of this, the Superintendent proposed that a pilot composting program be started in our school, King Open, and then hopefully after we do it, this composting effort will spread throughout all of the Cambridge public schools. All of this makes sense. We really want to use trays that we can compost -- as soon as their price comes down, as it is doing -- so this means when we switch to using those trays, and then both the trays and our food can go into the city’s big composting program.

About a year later – on December 16, 2008 – the Sprouts and two other students from King Open – talked with the Cambridge School Committee about the progress being made on our composting program. But we reminded them that even though we are really happy to be doing the composting pilot at our school that our goal is still to replace the polystyrene lunch trays in all of the Cambridge Public Schools.

Each of us talked for about two minutes about what we are doing at our school to help put this program into action. We told them how we are going to have a composting pep rally at our school. To lead off the pep rally, we are going to show a You Tube video of Will.I.Am's song “Yes We Can” that uses the words of President-elect Barack Obama. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY

We want everyone in the school to feel a part of this effort, so there are going to be auditions for parts in the few short skits we created. Here is some of what we told the school committee about these skits: These will be sketches about people like Ruby Bridges, an African-American girl who went to school even when white people shouted mean things at her and told her she could not go to their school. And because our school is named after Martin Luther King, Jr., the pep rally will end with words he might have said if he was with us today.

Here is part of what Dr. King’s voice will say:

“Having confidence in ourselves and our goals gave us the ability to accomplish what no one thought we could. Now, at King Open, we have the chance to show that what each student does matters a lot. By not letting anyone tell you that your effort does not matter, each of you can make our new composting program
a big success. And when you succeed, you will become leaders in Cambridge. Other schools and students will learn from you how to protect the planet Earth. I’m proud you named your school after me, especially at times like this when we say, “Yes We Can."

Along with students in an after-school science group and with our science teacher, Donna, we are working hard on making this composting project work at our school. The members of the school committee have been very supportive or our efforts, and they tell us to be patient and it will happen step-by-step. We have learned that getting a project like this done requires all of us taking little steps and taking them together. And even though it seems like a lot of time has gone by since we first told the school committee about the lunch tray problem, just a year later we are moving from having no composting program in the Cambridge schools and polystyrene trays in all of Cambridge Public Schools to having King Open’s composting program starting soon. I say it's a job well done.

After we spoke, the CEO of the Cambridge School Department told the school committee that composting is going to start at our school in late January. It's the first time we heard an actual date, so now we're excited it will happen soon.

As we've been working on this cafeteria project, we met a woman named Kelly Dunn who was working for the Cambridge Department of Public Works. She was in charge of recycling in the city, and she came and talked with us and was really eager to hear our ideas about how we could make our cafeteria and school more "green." It was really fun talking with her; she listened to our ideas, and she was a big supporter of our efforts to get the composting program started at our school and hopefully at a lot of other schools in Cambridge. There she is with us in this photograph -- that's her in the white sweater.

In the fall, we were sad to hear that she was leaving Cambridge to take a "green" job at Boston University -- she is now the sustainability coordinator for B.U.'s dining services, but we were happy for her because we knew she'd do a GREAT job!! And now The Boston Globe has written an article about her, and so we want to give you a link so you can meet Kelly and hear about all the things she is doing to make Boston University a greener place to eat.

http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/food/articles/2009/01/28/dining_at_green_u/

Letters to President Obama: Kids and Environmental Action

2008-12-10T03:58:00.000-08:00

In the middle of November, President-elect Barack Obama gave a very cool talk about climate change on his blog. We listened to it and really liked it when he said how much he cared doing something about what is happening to our planet as it gets warmer and warmer when he gets to be our President.

Listen to President-elect Obama talk about all of this on his Weblog at http://change.gov/newsroom/entry/president_elect_obama_promises_new_chapter_on_climate_change/

Hearing this gave us an idea. Since we are involved with a lot of environmental issues in our hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts, we decided to write to President-elect Obama and tell to let him know how glad we are that he is going to be our President and tell him about what we are doing so he can get a sense of how kids want to be taken seriously in all of the change that is going to have to happen. So much of what is going on now is going to affect what it's going to be like when we are grown-ups. We think kids like us should be included in finding a way to make this a better place for all of us to live. So we wrote our letters, which we will show you, and we are urging you to write to him, too. And if you want to send us your letters -- talking about what you are doing in your community to make the world a better place for us to grow up in -- we'd love to read them and share them with others who will come to our blog.

Letter to President Obama
Roots & Shoots: The Obama Connection

Dear President Obama:

My name is Mia and I am really happy you will be our next President. I live in Cambridge, MA where I am part of a Roots and Shoots group called "The Sprouts of Hope." Roots and Shoots is an organization started by Jane Goodall for kids all around the world. She started Roots and Shoots (http://www.rootsandshoots.org/) in Tanzania with just a small group of kids. It has grown and grown and now there are Roots and Shoots groups around the world.
Jane Goodall started this group because she knew kids wanted to make a difference in their communities but they didn't know how. The idea was kids, like those in Roots and Shoots, are small, but if they want to they can make a big difference.

You have shown the world than anyone can be President. We know that what we do can make a difference. That is why we are trying to make our school greener. We are helping to start a composting program in our school in addition to other projects we do.

"Yes We Can!" is how we are introducing our program. At our Cambridge public school, King Open, you are a big figure. In the beginning of the year, you could hear "Obama 'O8" ringing through the hall and see it on stickers, buttons, and T-shirts students word proudly. When me, my mom, and two friends made calls to get out the vote the day before the elections, we knew even our calls (we mostly got answering machines) were making a difference.

As an environmental group that does projects to make our community more green, we will really appreciate the things you are going to do as President to make our country more green.

Congratulations!

Sincerely, Mia and The Sprouts of Hope

Letter to President Obama: Helping the Environment

Dear President Obama

We are so glad and happy you won the election! We are the Sprouts of Hope, a Roots and Shoots group (http://www.rootsandshoots.org/). The Sprouts of Hope is an environmental group. We were very excited when we found out you had won. We think you will help with all our environmental issues, such as global warming.We have recently won the Cambridge GoGreen Award for all of our activities. http://www.cambridgema.gov/CDD/et/ggm/gg_bawhist.html

We have done plenty of things such as organizing Waste-Free Lunch Days at our school. We have done a "Stop Global Warming" walk as part of the nationwide StepItUp campaign. In January, our school is going to be the 1st school in Cambridge to start composting.

As Sprouts, we really admire you and hope you will help make a positive change in the environment.

Sincerely, Kaya in the Sprouts of Hope group

P.S. Tell your daughters hi! We think your daughters are really awesome? The Sprouts of Hope are 7 girls, ages 11-13, in Cambridge, MA

Outstanding
Believe
Awesome
Makes change
Amazing

Letters to President Obama: Inspiring Us

2008-12-09T18:05:00.001-08:00

Dear President-Elect Obama,

Hi! My name is Lilly. I am 12 years old and I go to a Cambridge public school. I am writing to tell you how excited we are that you have been elected because I and the rest of my environmental group think you will help with environmental issues.

Also we wanted you to know that we are using you as an inspiration for the (school district's first) composting program in January (same month you are inaugurated!) that we are starting in our school. To get the other kids at our school informed and excited, we are having a schoolwide assembly. In the assembly, we are including a music video called "Yes We can" by Will I Am with you in it. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yq0tMYPDJQ) Also we have some skits that different kids in the school will be performing. Its main idea is "yes we can" (our logo for the composting program, too) and the skits feature Ruby Bridges, Craig Mello, Dolores Huerta, Sally Ride and Martin Luther King, Jr. and talk about times in their lives when they found a way to get through difficult times by saying "yes we can."

Congratulations again! Sincerely, Lilly, a Sprouts of Hope member.

Dear President Obama,

I am so glad you are now the President. There are people who I think of as people really moving the community forward. Those are people like Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr, and more recently you. Those people help people (and whole communities) like me, everyday people, realize how many things are possible.

That relates to my Roots and Shoots group; if our composting pilot program works in our school, maybe it can spread to other schools in Cambridge,and possibly farther away. We are letting other schools know that composting can work. By doing this, we also know we are helping the planet. We're so glad you want to help the planet, too, by taking on the problem of climate change.

Sincerely, Risa, Cambridge, MA

Letters to President Obama: Making a Difference

2008-12-09T17:54:00.000-08:00

Dear Soon-to-be President Obama,

I am very, very, very, very, very, VERY happy that you have been elected our next President. Congratulations! I knew that you were very interested in the global climate issues in our world and we, as the Roots and Shoots group, The Sprouts of Hope, really agree with the speech you made on climate change.

As a Roots and Shoots group, one of our main priorities is the climate and the world we live in. We have many influences like Jane Goodall and Martin Luther King, Jr, but you are also a great influence to us because the way you persisted and kept giving speech after speech in many different states really proved that eventually we will make a difference and that we can make a change, especially a good one. Already, we are going to use a video made and dedicated to you (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yq0tMYPDJQ) for a school assembly we will have about composting. We have many different projects and to know that a person of any race, gender, country, etc. can make a difference really inspires us so much. So thank you very much, Mr. Obama, for your persistence that proved to us that anyone can make a difference. Or as you would say, "Yes We can."

Sincerely, Jane, Sprouts of Hope, Cambridge, MA

P.S. Thank you for your time to read this message. Congratulations again!

Letters to President Obama: Yes We Can!

2008-12-09T17:43:00.000-08:00

Dear President Elect Obama,

My name is Eliza. I am 11 years old. I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I am part of a Roots and Shoots group. Roots and Shoots is Jane Goodall's international organization for kids. We try to promote peace and do community service for animals and the environment.

My family is so excited that you are the President-elect. My mother worked in New Hampshire every week this fall and my brothers and I went canvasing for you. I am happy that you are the President because I know that you will take care of the environment and stop global warming.

It is important for people all over to learn how to make the world a better place. Recently, our Roots and Shoots group made a donation so other kids from low-income populations can join Roots and Shoots, too, and make a difference. The fund that was made for our donation was in honor of Shari Zimble, a mother of one of our Roots and Shoots group members. Share passed away twelve days before the election. The dedication of the fund was to honor Shari's life and the things she stood for. One of those things was change. We know that you, as President, will stand for a healthier, more peaceful, environment and community of our country and planet, and will make change. Thank you so much for caring, like us, about the future of the earth, and we know you will make a positive difference.

Congrats on the President Elect!

Sincerely, Eliza, a Sprout of Hope, the Cambridge chapter of Roots & Shoots

Letters to President Obama: The 6 R's

2008-12-09T17:28:00.000-08:00

Dear President Obama,

This past February I went to Nashua, New Hampshire to see you speak. In October, we went back to canvas. My mom and I knocked on doors and handed out information.

I am part of a Roots and Shoots group called The Sprouts of Hope. We do projects in our community to try to make the world a better place.

We realize how interested you have been in climate change and global warming. We have seen your climate change video. The Sprouts have made a pledge card using the 6 R's (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Renew, Rethink and Rot (compost). People sign the card when they pledge to live by the 6 R's.

We have found that a lot of people care about the environment and are grateful that now we have a leader who will help us to reach our goals.

Congratulations on becoming our next President.

Sincerely, Maya and The Sprouts of Hope