The Sprouts of Hope's Quilt and Bill McKibben

Unveiling Our Quilt on WBUR's show "On Point"

By Maya

On the evening of June 14 the Sprouts of Hope had a remarkable experience. We were asked to join WBUR’s On Point radio host Tom Ashbrook and climate change activist Bill McKibben at a live show they were doing at the Paramount Center in Boston. First Tom and Bill did their hour-long interview for On Point for broadcast the next morning. 

Tom Ashbrook interviews Bill McKibben on WBUR's  "On Point"

As soon as they finished, and in front of the audience of several hundred people who had donated to WBUR to attend this live show, the Sprouts of Hope were invited to come out on stage so that we could present our sustainability quilt to Bill McKibben. He is one of three people who have inspired us because of their environmental work and whose portraits we feature on our quilt.

To the sounds of loud music with African drums, we came on stage carrying our unopened quilt. After Tom introduced us, I said a few words about our quilt project and then we opened it so that Bill — and the audience —could see it. As we did, the audience applauded loudly. I pointed to the bottom of the quilt so Bill could see his portrait; it appears under the words “We are the Sprouts of Hope. These are our inspirations.” His portrait is next to Jane Goodall, known for her groundbreaking study of chimpanzees (and to us as the founder of Roots & Shoots), who is next to Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai, who won the award for the Green Belt Movement she founded in Africa.

This is when we could tell Bill McKibben liked our quilt.

Our Kids For Stopping Global Warming, April 14, 2007

Tom asked us questions about why we made the quilt and our goals for how it will be used. He wanted to know why we decided to put Bill our quilt? We first came to know about Bill’s efforts to engage people in doing something to halt global warming when we were in elementary school and he did his Step It Up campaign on April 14, 2007. The Sprouts organized a kids’ march to fight global warming on this National Day of Climate Action. A lot of kids and families joined us to march from MIT to the Boston Common rally where we heard speakers and we were interviewed about our march. 

The Step It Up campaign truly got us into the mindset that kids do make a difference when they get involved in these issues.

During the On Point interview that night we learned about McKibben’s on-going work with his organization 350.org. He chose that number because 350 parts per million is the level of CO2 in the atmosphere that we have to get down to in order to preserve the planet. However, there are currently about 392 parts per million of CO2. Tom also talked with him about efforts to stop the Keystone pipeline. 

The Sprouts of Hope's Business Card

The audience seemed to love our quilt —judging by the loud sustained applause they gave us when we opened it to show Bill. He also seemed quite pleased with it and liked having his portrait on it.  Backstage, we with him talked and gave him a Sprouts of Hope card so we can stay in contact. We’d like to work with him on his 350.org campaign.

My mom sent him photographs of our time together, and here is what he wrote back:

“These are so lovely. Would you please tell the girls that I saw Jane G. in Istanbul on Tuesday and told her all about our evening, and she sent her love. (She even let me give my talk there with her stuffed monkey on the podium!)

p.s. Just tweeted out a link to the Sprouts’ blog —people deserve to know about the great work you are doing.

The whole experience was exceedingly fun. Hopefully this quilt will serve as a vision of what sustainability looks like in a city like Cambridge, and encourage kids and adults to act in ways that make our hometown — and other communities — more sustainable places to live. 

Tom Ashbrook (left), The Sprouts of Hope and our quilt and Bill McKibben at the live WBUR "On Point" event on June 14, 2012.

Sprouts: Energy Lite at the Northeast Youth Summit

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 Lite" 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.

Endangered Species: Our Roots & Shoots Youth Summit

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: Passing Down What We've Learned

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

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: Keeping A River Healthy

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.

Compost: From Our School Cafeteria to the Farm

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.