DEVELOPING A SENSE OF COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
Being involved in various service groups for a while now has given me great insight into what can be done to help and support a community, however, it is not until I created my own business concept that I felt I was starting to make a sustained commitment to serving the community and connecting with other groups around me who shared a similar passion.
In this post, I want to focus on how my passion for environmental protection and sustainability is starting to make an impact in my school community. This passion has been thriving for the past 5 years, although I never felt as though I had made an impact that truly implemented a meaningful solution with the projects I would do or service I groups I took part in. I decided that for my Personal Project in Year 11, I would aim to come up with a solution that could help the community and our environment in a meaningful way. The problem I identified is that in our community there is a need for more environmentally friendly packaging and we often happen to waste resources that could easily be reused. I decided that I would develop the business concept I had create the year before and try my best to implement that solution.
I have had a sustained interest in the topic ever since the Year 6 exhibition where I started looking into issues regarding the environment more closely. Ever since I have created school project on the topic, but felt that it was never enough to make a bigger impact in the community.
As I developed this concept, I started making connections with a service group here at school, called the GreeNIST Rooftop. They are serving the school community with organic and local supplies from the rooftop at school, and as we got in contact, it turned out they had been looking for a more sustainable alternative to packaging their solutions. This would benefit the school community as this would not only promote environmental consciousness, it would also help the community act more environmentally friendly to prevent further plastic consumption. My aim had been to help the school community to find more environmentally friendly alternatives, and by working with them this idea could be implemented. I was challenged as in order to get my product out there, I had to communicate with a new group and forced me to step out of my comfort zone. The first step was to set up a meeting so that we could discuss the possibility.
This was our very first meeting where I presented my concept to them and we started discussing further steps to take. We have been building this relationship ever since:
After this experience, it is great to have made a new connection with this service group and we are working together to bring sustainable packaging to the community.We have met a few times by now and still developing the concept. However, I was then able to engage the community by presenting this concept at the Personal Project fair, interacting with many individuals and explaining my project to them.
I am now at a point where I am spreading the concept and making more connections with other service groups as well. Recently I have been in contact with a new service group who is looking to also find more sustainable packaging. My plan is to turn this project into a service group so that we can make use of wasted resources and promote environmental sustainability. I am using my website as a tool to not only make people in the community aware of what we can do to become more conscious, I am also promoting events for everyone to take part in and contribute:
The impact which this has had on the community is that we have been able to make connections between different groups and collectively come together over an issue and find a way to address it. A connection made which I did not realize would also benefit the community was using the resources from school from the art department, as they have been wasting less resources I could use them to fuel the project. It connects the community in areas of more environmentally friendly production as well as consumption.
These are the products which I am providing for the community for anyone who is interested or for future projects with other service groups. I was involved in building my own equipment to help me make the products that could be served in the community:
I am definitely planning on maintaining this commitment as I feel a sense of responsibility in keeping the connections which I have started to build with others. My goal would be to involve the whole community and make them conscious of this concept, so that we can create a lasting change in the future.
Hannah