Returning to its roots in Pleasanton, the Go Green Initiative is scheduled to hold its second annual Go Green Earth Summit next week, March 30-April 1, at the Pleasanton Hilton. Nearly 200 teachers, PTA members, administrators and others involved with Go Green are scheduled to attend the three-day conference where they will listen to keynote speakers and attend workshops.
“We are doing the conference annually because the program is growing so fast that there are new people coming into the network all the time,” said Jill Buck, founder of Go Green and the executive director of the initiative. “It’s our premier training event.”
Buck created the Go Green Initiative in Pleasanton nearly four years ago. Go Green is a comprehensive environmental action plan for schools built on five principles–generate compost, recycle, educate, evaluate and nationalize principles of proper paper consumption–to create a framework for teaching environmental awareness on campuses. Families, businesses and local governments come together through the program to reach the common goal of protecting health through environmental stewardship.
Conference participants will have the chance to attend a variety of environment-related workshops with titles such as “Composting Made Simple” and “Basic Concepts in Recycling Education.”
Who’ll take part
“The crowd for this year is very different, although we do have some coming back because we have a different speaker line-up and different topics from last year,” Buck said. “In fact, we have a lot of schools that were not Go Green schools last year who are now and they want to get the training. There’s so much that the Go Green Initiative covers that it’s really important that people have the best information that is the most trustworthy and up-to-date.”
Several “Go Green” awards will also be given out during the conference, including the “Go Green School Award” which goes to Granada High School in Livermore. A special award will be given to Teresa Huk’s first grade class at Vintage Hills Elementary School to honor the work they’ve done collecting recyclables to raise money for cancer research in honor of a classmate who died from a rare form of cancer earlier in the school year.
“It’s an amazing thing they’ve done, so we’re honoring them in a special way, for doing something good for the environment and much, much more,” Buck said. New York State and Grand Prairie, Texas are also being recognized as the Go Green State and City of the Year, respectively.
Why Pleasanton?
Buck said she decided to hold the conference in Pleasanton again since it is the home of Go Green and so that new Go Green schools would have the chance to tour Pleasanton’s schools.
“I always look forward to the tours of our Go Green schools,” she said. “We can sit in and talk for days, but there’s no substitute for seeing it in action–not to mention how proud I am to show what Pleasanton schools have done.”
This is the last year the conference will be in Pleasanton. Next year it is scheduled for Texas and the following year is in New York. After last year’s conference, Buck said the Go Green Initiative grew “exponentially,” spreading to 14 states and even internationally to Cameroon, a country in West Africa. Seeing this growth has been one of the most exciting things about working with Go Green, Buck said.
“We’ve seen that Go Green works as well in urban communities as it does in suburban and rural communities. That’s the best thing that came out of the Summit: What we hoped was true turned out to be true–this program works anywhere at any community.”
