Our fourth meeting - Action and Results

At the last meeting we chose our goal of adopting a dolphin with the funds we would raise.  We ended up proceeding as planned and doing a bottle drive in the local town.  Well, it was a complete success as we raised over $300 in just a couple of hours!  We were well organized, worked in teams, and were graced with reasonable weather.  Everyone was pumped to be actually working towards our goal and we had lots of help from the parents too.

We adopted a dolphin via WCDS, an organization out of the UK that monitors and protects sea life.  Through the adoption we got a nice letter thanking us for the donation, the name and picture of a specific dolphin, and some stickers that I shared between the club members.  It was great to see the results of the adoption and feel good about it inside but at the same time I felt it necessary to have something concrete like a photo or stickers that the kids could touch and go home with.  The bunch I have is very open and aware so I don't think they 'needed' to have something material come back from the adoption but it was nice to have nonetheless.

So the theme of this meeting was of action and the environment.  After discussing and celebrating the action we took, we went on to discuss all of the different methods of acting and how other people and organizations that take action around the world.  We talked about Greenpeace, Ghandi, and even touched briefly on ecoterrorism in order to converse about where the line is between activism and criminality.  This is a young group (6-12) so I didn't go very deep here as I didn't want to scare them or throw them for a loop but I found it was important to touch on the subject and all of the shades of grey around it.  It's important to bring up all sorts of subject matter, even stuff that might be a little prickly. The challenge is to discuss at a level that the kids can understand and doing it with extreme sensitivity to how they will react.  Complete failure would be to have a discussion result in fear and anxiety in the children.  That is the be avoided at all costs.

This meeting marked the end of the first year of the club and the beginning of a great summer to come.