Green Team held numerous events and sales to promote eco-friendly actions and raise environmental awareness as a part of its club week this week. 

Throughout the week, the club sold baked goods and smoothies in reusable mason jars to fundraise for environmental action.

“All of the proceeds from the bake sale will be going to Earthjustice, which is a non-profit environmentally-centric law firm. They actually do other things besides just helping the environment—they also help DACA protesters for free,” Green Team member Allison John (9) said.

One of the primary activities for the week was the Green High Schools Challenge, a competition between high schools to promote environment-friendly actions through the Shine by Joulebug app. Students added to a schoolwide score by logging in actions that helped to save or conserve resources in some way, and top school contributors received prizes. Other high schools in the challenge included Pinewood, Bishop O’Dowd and Nueva.

“We used this app in my sophomore year, so two years ago too,” Green Team co-president Anika Banga (12) said. “Back then, we decided to do a competition just between the classes of Harker, and it got really competitive so we knew we wanted to bring it back at some point in time, and this just seemed like a good year!”

Other activities included a reusable water bottle adoption, for which Green Team members sanitized water bottles from the campus lost and found and put them up for free for Harker community members. The club will also host a clothing swap next Thursday, in which students can bring their clothing and find new apparel from other students.

“We want to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to reuse everything that we have,” Allison said.

In addition, the club hosted Isabelle Cnudde of Clorofil during long lunch on Friday, who talked about sustainable agriculture in Nichols Auditorium. Throughout the week, the club also offered students the opportunity to write postcards to push for local, statewide and national environmental action.

“We’re writing on the local, state and federal level, so we’re supporting one bill for each. We’re writing to the EPA, we’re writing to [California] governor Jerry Brown about SB-100, which is a bill that supports 100% clean energy, and we’re writing for local environmental issues as well,” Anika said.

For the rest of the school year, Green Team will be focusing on creating a smooth transition to next year’s officers to continue its mission of helping the environment.

There will be no club week next week. Harker Spirit’s club week from April 30 to May 4 will be the last of this school year’s club weeks.