After a very busy summer, I am finally getting into the swing of a new FAWCO year! I hope all of you are rested and rejuvenated after your summer break and I/we look forward to working together for the good of the environment this year. We want to help you help the environment!
Let me start with a bit of information on the Environment Team. We are a group of 13 women representing 8 different clubs & FAUSA who are passionate about making a positive impact on the environment. We work together to get the word out and welcome all interested parties to join us - many hands make work light…and satisfying! Our goal is to inform FAWCO members of relevant environmental issues and provide suggestions for positive actions. To do this, we will make 10 monthly articles with information that can easily be "copy and pasted" for inclusion in Club newsletters. Since everyone is busy, we hope that by providing information in this form, it will be easy to pass on to your club members! (If you have any difficulties using the text or illustrations in our articles, contact me and I can send it in word format.)
Be sure to scroll down to the fun links with easy action ideas at the bottom. :-)
NEW: The Global Issues Digest
In an effort to reduce the amount of mail FAWCO sends out to members, the individual Bulletins of the Global Issues (Education, Environment, Health and Human Rights) will be combined in a monthly Global Issues Digest. All of the information previously in the Bulletins will now be posted directly on the FAWCO Website and the GI Digest will provide brief info + links to their information. Since the new European GDPR (privacy) regulations necessitated having everyone re-sign up for Bulletins, this was deemed the ideal moment to introduce this new condensed format for the Global Issues information.
Environment Team – what’s in the pipeline?
Anyone who isn’t sure how important the environment is need only look at the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Of the 17 SDGs, 6 of them are directly linked to the environment!
Our Team plans to write and publish 10 articles in the coming Club year and we hope you will forward the information to other Club and/or friends and family, as well as “cut and paste” the information in your Club Newsletter or Magazine. A few of the topics we will we focusing on: Tree planting guide for clubs; Reducing your carbon footprint; Food, Feeding people and zero hunger; Global Warming and the Extinction of some Animals; and Climate Change and Gender. Let us help you get more informed!
Club involvement in Earth Day (April 22)
Thanks to the short survey we circulated at the Interim Meeting in The Hague, we found out that while many people are concerned about the environment, few clubs have any kind of organized activity to focus attention on it. We would like to change that and want to encourage every club to organize something in honor of Earth Day on April 22nd. It can be a speaker at a meeting, a visit to a local environmental agency or facility, support for a local initiative via a fund-raiser, planting a tree locally… The list is long and there is sure to be something that would be a good fit for your club! It would be great if you could get it on your club calendar now. We will send out more ideas in the coming months, starting in October when we will provide a tree planting guide for clubs.
Club projects and the FAWCO Foundation DGs
Did you know that there was no Foundation Development Grant (DG) awarded to an environmental project in 2016 or 2017? The reason was NOT that there are no worthy projects to support, but that NO projects were submitted. This is truly tragic and we’d like to encourage clubs to find a project, local or further afield, that you as a Club could become involved in supporting. This project could then be submitted for consideration for a DG. It would be a win for the environment and a win for your club to have the recognition and support of the Foundation. Please do a quick Google search and see if there is a project your club could support.
Fun Links :-)
Lastly, a couple of fun links for you with easy action ideas and one person’s actions to help the ocean:
- 9 Tips for Living With Less Plastic
- A Lazy Person’s Guide to Saving the World
- Coral is the backbone of the whole tropical ecosystem and if it disappears, we’re in a lot of trouble. In this 2½ minute video learn how one man plants coral in an offshore nursery near the Florida Keys and reintroduces it to the reefs, helping our ocean breathe better one coral polyp at a time: Healing the Ocean with a Garden of Coral
Environment Co-chairs: Anne van Oorschot (AWC The Hague) & Renuka Matthews (individual member – Dubai) -
Environment Team members: Amal Lahlafi (AIWA of Rabat), Amanda Drollinger (AWC Central Scotland), Ann Zulliger (AWC Zurich), Jo Brandt (FAUSA), Jule Deleroi (Augsburg IWC), Karen Rudin (AWC Zurich), Meenakshi Advani (AIWC Mumbai), Paula Daeppen (AWC Zurich), Rena Levin (AWC Oslo), Sarah Wallace (AWC Genoa), Valerie Garforth (FAUSA)
