This new Whatcom initiative hopes to give students help to take action on climate change
The Green Team Network is a long time coming, said Priscilla Brotherton.
“It feels like there have been green teams, fits and starts, all throughout schools in the county,” said Brotherton, the Sustainable Schools program manager at environmental nonprofit RE Sources. “But there hasn’t been a concerted effort to coordinate that work with curriculum.”
The Green Team Network is a grant-funded initiative the organization is launching at the beginning of this upcoming school year. The program seeks to support Whatcom County’s elementary and middle schools in forming green teams, or groups of students advocating to make their schools and communities more sustainable.
Green teams are as much about supporting students as they are about protecting the environment, Brotherton said. The impacts of climate change are growing more frequent and severe — a massive wildfire is blazing in Oregon, Whatcom County’s smoke season is on the horizon and the recent heat wave roasted marine critters alive and has been linked to hundreds of deaths. The weight of climate change can be overwhelming to anyone, and children are not exempt, Brotherton said.
“Now more than ever, students have to feel hope, and they have to know what’s happening. Being part of this would allow them to take action and not sit in the doom and gloom of climate change,” she said. “We have to offer them agency to be able to do something, rather than just learn about it.”
The Green Team Network is funded in part by the Whatcom County Health Department and the city of Bellingham. Educators have already shown interest at Blaine Elementary School and Mount Baker Academy as well as in Bellingham Public Schools. RE Sources will continue outreach for the program throughout the fall.
Not every school’s green team has to look the same, said Chelsea Hilmoe, Green Team Network coordinator. The groups can be led by teachers, parents or volunteers, and the meetings can be built into the school day or scheduled as an after-school activity. The dream is that all schools in the county will one day be as sustainable as possible, Hilmoe said, with recycling, composting and maybe even solar panels.
“By giving students a project to take on in their school, where they are regularly and can see results of actions, we feel is a really powerful tool in developing stewards of the environment later on,” Hilmoe said.
In a year, Hilmoe hopes there are enough green teams across Whatcom County to meet at a summit and share the work they’ve been doing.
“Hopefully that can then give more students more ideas to take on more projects,” she said.
This story was originally published July 26, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
