Youth Venture

We work on advocacy projects in both our school and community to fight global warming and make a difference.

The club was founded in 2007 by Chloe Maxmin. We currently has about fifteen members. Each one is extremely dedicated and inspired to save this planet. We have come together for a common purpose, and we have created strong bonds that enforce and encourage our work. We want to not only raise awareness about climate change in our school and community, but make a difference and have a significant impact. We want to demonstrate to students and communities around our state and nation that high school students can make a difference.
The Climate Action Club is a student run club at Lincoln Academy in Newcastle, Maine. We are dedicated to raising awareness about and fighting global warming both in our school and community. The Climate Action Club works with local merchants to ban plastic bags in our town, create a town-wide canvas bag, and creat a community-wide awareness. At the moment, we are running a campaign that we call The Shopping Bag Heard Round the World. Our goal is to buy canvas bags with a town logo on them, and then give the bags to the merchants so they can distribute the bags to customers for free. We hope this will create awareness and cause people to change their behavior. We calculate that this will save 4.8 x 1010 lbs of CO2 and an energy savings of 398,930,400 BTU’s. It means 671,600 less bags in our landfill each, with fewer bags to leach toxic chemicals into our soil and harm local wildlife and marine life.
We have initiated a battery recycling program in our school, and we want to carry this idea throughout our community. We already recycled 4000 batteries from the receptacles in our school, and we think that we could make an ever bigger difference if we worked with the community as well.
The club also wants to install energy efficient software on the school computers. This would save hundreds of kilowatts of energy, and it would be a model that other students could follow and bring home to their families. We have also talked with our school's faculty about ideal computer behavior, and we hope this will help save energy as well.
We also want to install vending misers on the vending machines in our school because this would be a great way to reduce energy costs and save energy right in school.
We are initiating a cartridge recycling program and working with CARTRIDGES FOR KIDS to raise money.
Our club researched the number of idling buses and cars on our campus. We noted how long they were idling and calculated energy waste. We proposed a no-idling policy to our school head. We posted two NO IDLE ZONE signs around our school to stop idling on school property. Club members and I have been leaving class early to go and talk to idling cars. We are raising awareness about the issue and promoting the No Idle policy. We want to post more signs in the other school parking lots so people can clearly see what we are trying to do.
Finally, the Climate Action Club is going to work with the school facilities board and energy auditors to make our school more energy efficient. This has been a major goal of ours, and we are eager to fulfill it. We also plan to spearhead a fundraising effort so that families and others in our community can contribute to the energy efficiency efforts of the school. This will help raise a new level of consciousness in our town on the importance of reducing our carbon footprint. Please visit our website at http://laclimateaction.webs.com.