On Friday, Oct. 9, juniors Jenna Lee and Isabela Segarra, founders of the new Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School chapter of the Go Green Initiative, hosted their first meeting, motivating over 40 SPFHS students to take action to help the environment. 
At the end of the summer, Lee and Segarra were inspired to partner with the national climate action group: the Go Green Initiative. With the understanding that change starts at a local level, they wanted to do their parts to work towards a more green SPFHS community. 
“I feel like it’s [climate change is] just a big issue that needs to be solved,” Segarra said. “But, like, more on a local level, I’ve seen that our town isn’t very eco-friendly. I feel like as a whole, maybe we could talk more about being eco-friendly throughout the school and just promote it more.”
Before school started, the pair had the opportunity to Zoom with the President of the Go Green Initiative, Jill Buck, and their project manager, Celine Leroudier, to discuss their plans for the SPFHS chapter of the Go Green Initiative. 
Lee and Segarra hope to address environmental concerns within SPFHS and the SPF community as a whole, including, but not limited to, ensuring that SPFHS properly recycles and works towards getting increased trash bins on local streets to decrease littering. With support from the national chapter of the Go Green Initiative, Lee and Segarra hope to take concerns such as these to the Board of Education and the Town Councils of SPF. 
Beyond these structural changes, Lee and Segarra hope to continue to encourage the SPFHS community to take climate action – they not only wish for immediate implementation of eco-friendly policies in the community, but in the hearts of the people in it. 
“We had a challenge on the Project Green Challenge of how we calculate how much water we use in a day, I was expecting maybe like 10 to five gallons a day, but it got into the thousands,” Lee said. “I never realized [that] the dishwasher, laundry, [and] water we drink all add to that total. …It was really eye-opening. And that’s one of the small changes that I’ve made to just be more efficient with my water… I never realized the big impact it could have.”
Segarra and Lee invite students to follow @spfhs_ggi, and/or contact them if they have any questions. 
 
Photo via https://gogreeninitiative.org/