Origins
The Green Cause started with founders Frida Ruiz and Bianca Palomino. When noticing the lack of emphasis on environmental education in her town, Frida wanted to extend the knowledge necessary to spark urgency in the young generation that will soon take charge of the future. Bianca resonated with this idea as she realized that her town had extremely limited information on the environment within the courses and activities available throughout her time in the public education system. At the peak of the pandemic, Frida and Bianca worked towards recruiting members and contacting schools within, first, their counties and soon expanding throughout all of New Jersey while also presenting at panels that advocated for the voices of youth leaders and environmental change.
Our Three Pillars
Engagement
We make sure all of our work including lesson presentations contain various forms of engagement. From the visuals and aesthetics of the slides to the presentation styles, we are sure our lessons can engage the proper audience. Presentations may contain excerpts from different movies and current media to introduce the topic at hand or comprehension questions scattered throughout. Most importantly, our lessons have an educational activity associated with the topic covered; such as mini demonstrations and hands-on experiments.
Solution-Based Learning
Environmental education oftentimes highlights the problems and effects caused by global warming (which are important). However, potential solutions or tangible action is not brought up as consistently. When solutions are brought up, real-life methods of implementation are rarely brought up and the gap between the potential and actually created. Thus why our work includes solutions that can be implemented catered to the target audience at hand. Ranging from presenting other environmental educational resources (i.e. websites, movies, books, etc.) to highlighting and empowering students to join other environmental youth led organizations.
Considering the Impacts
We realize the importance of not abstracting environmental issues as many don’t realize how the effects of climate change are occurring in nearby communities; particularly underserved communities. Our lessons describe a real life event which occurred due to the particular issue covered: the people impacted, the outcome, etc. We hope to also bring to light environmental injustices that are occurring within our communities and the values of learning from other people’s experiences.