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.

Cambridge Science Festival: The Sprouts of Hope Exhibit

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

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

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

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

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.

1. It's important kids understand they should try not to change everything all at the same time.
2. Teach patience and persistence. It’s a winning combination!
3. Don’t give up when something doesn’t work for the first time.
4. Make good partners; include parents, teachers, staff, administrators and city employees.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Evaluate how to best spent your limited time and energy.
8. 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

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.