Here's My Great Green Idea!

Spring emerges overnight with Eastern Bluebirds warbling at dawn! Our youth Pioneer Club is proactively partaking an enterprise project on Arbor Day and Earth Day in April. When I and other parents designed the programs for our Pioneer club last summer, we decided to ask all the parents and youth to participate in the Arbor Day and Earth Day celebration in 2008. In addition to encouraging the families to be involved in the Arbor Day tree-planting event, we registered our Club as a member of the National Arbor Day Foundation (NADF). We will nurture our children, the future Nature Stewards, by experiencing all the educational activities recommended by NADF. Our Club began to recycle reusable supplies and materials for craft projects. The parent-child groups will assist in cleaning-up our neighboring Alley Pond Park and removing invasive plant species. Furthermore, we will plant trees and bring our own-purchased native shrubs in honor of Arbor Day. These self-initiative shrub planting projects are our club's passion of helping to provide shelter and food for our native animals. Not only are we helping to conserve the environment with the projects described above, we are also contributing to the preservation of the environment by instituting some practices within our club. For example, we are limiting the use of harmful materials like Styrofoam cups, turning off unused lights, and recycling paper for club projects, encouraging outings by public transportation.

As a member of Community Concern Committee (CCC) of a local Chinese church of almost nine hundred people, I shared the vision of Pioneer Club's Arbor Day project during CCC program planning meeting last year. The entire committee cheerfully and eagerly endorsed the mission of inspiring and nurturing both Chinese and English congregational brothers and sisters, and our neighboring communities to be aware of their crucial roles as "Nature Stewards" for our beautiful planet, and mobilize them to contribute their responsible impacts on their existing environment. The committee will conduct a conservancy workshop around Earth Day through partnership with Alley Pond Environmental Center (APEC) for the entire neighborhood. The workshop will aim at educating our communities to understand the relationship between tree & environmental conservation; the history of tree planting and care; the benefits of planting trees to our modern world; the immediate devastating impact of deforestation upon cities around the world; and to motivate our neighbors' commitment and awareness of environmental conservation during this opportune moment. I am thrilled to promote the entire church and neighboring communities as "Nature Stewards" to participate both Earth Day workshop and the 29th Annual Arbor Day Celebration with APEC!