Our third meeting - Voting and Organizing

One of the concepts I introduced to the kids early on was the Action Box.  We built the Action Box together and decorated it as one of our activities in a prior meeting and made it clear that any ideas someone has can be put in the box and referred to later on when we decide to act.

At this meeting we decided to look at all of the ideas that were in the box so far and vote on what we should act on.  There were lots of a great ideas in there, from planting flowers to beautify the local soccer fields, to protesting the animal circus that was coming to town.  I was pumped to hear all of the various ideas and it was clear these kids are truly engaged and motivated to improve the health of our planet!

After explaining each idea clearly we voted through secret ballot.  This process covered another one of my goals with the club which is to introduce them to how peaceful democracy works.  Those who were responsible for the idea had a chance to stand up and promote it and I helped as best I could where this was difficult as these are all pretty young kids.  I chose the secret ballot because it is representative of the larger electoral system and also not to create any division between club members as no one knew who voted for or against an idea.

In the end, we decided to raise money in order to adopt an animal and with further voting we decided on a dolphin through WCDS.  This was a great idea because it leads to something very ecology sensitive and also to something concrete (stickers and a picture of a dolphin that the organization is tracking).

The rest of the meeting we organized around how we would raise money (a bottle drive), who would do what, when we could do it, etc.   Not all was decided on the spot because parents needed to have their input and I needed to assign roles to kids based on their abilities so much of it was worked out via email afterwards.  But in the end, everyone was pumped to actually do something with a common goal in mind!

If I can get the club members to learn what do to when they have an idea, how to organize together with like minded people, and how to act peacefully and constructively to achieve that goal, we'll have kids that will grow into adults that won't be passively accepting things they feel are wrong in our world.  We'll have activists and citizens not only willing to act for what they believe in, but able to act because they'll have practised it before in a safe and non-judgemental environment.  And I'll be a happy camper indeed :-)