On the 27th of October, Lake Region’s TAG Team (Together Anything Grows) attended the 2023 Youth Environmental Summit. The summit is put together by the University of Vermont Extension 4-H program and all of the workshops are run by students from different schools around the state. The TAG Team broke off into their separate activities to really see it all. 

One activity was done by Up For learning and the Youth Voice & Agency. This activity had students looking at their school and comparing themselves to a seed, the school community to the dirt, and the teachers to the nurturement of the seeds. Students thought about what stage of growth they thought their school provided to them. In this activity, the students also looked at the WHO’s Sustainable development goals, and each group organized the goals into different tiers according to which they thought were the most important. There was lots of academic discussion amongst the groups involving cause and effect relationships and psychological predispositions.

Another workshop was run by the Lake Champlain Water Basin Program and talked about watersheds and the importance of keeping our water clean. This workshop, after the initial introduction, consisted of two activities. One was looking at these three big questions:

• What Does Clean Water Mean to You?

• What Can People Do to Help Achieve a Positive Future for Vermont’s Waters?

• What Environmental Issues are You Concerned About?

The other was looking at a small model of a watershed. There was a little model town with homes, roads, mountains, construction, a school, and farms. They sprinkled little bits of food, spices, coffee grounds, and so on to represent things like trash, dirt, waste and other pollutants. Then they showed what happened when it rained, and all the materials flooded the lake and “polluted” it. 

The next workshop was one put on by Teens Reaching Youth (TRY). TRY is a teen-led environmental education program that teaches environmental literacy and responsibility to Vermont youth. TRY’s four program areas consist of 6 one-hour, elementary-aged lessons that are fun, hands-on, and taught by middle and high school students. Three of these students led an activity that they usually teach to their younger students. In this activity, each group had to use three index cards, tape, scissors, and an already put together windmill set up with dowels, to design propellers that would spin the windmill and lift up a small cup filled with washers. 

The TAG team then had a delicious zero waste lunch together on the bus consisting of fruits, veggies, sandwiches, cookies, and cider. Then they took part in the info table scavenger hunt. There was a paper with at least one question per table, and each person started hunting for their answers. One of the more popular tables was Women Working, where you could hit a piece of metal with a hammer to learn about Equal Pay Day. Equal pay day is the amount of days that the average woman would have to work into the following year, just to meet the same amount made by a man in one year on average. Another popular table was guessing the weight of a pumpkin and writing your guess on a little paper. Near the end of this time block, the youth running the Summit led the students in a chant. “Speak Up, Act Now, Be The Change” rang throughout the main hall as free environmental merch was thrown into the crowd of students.

The last workshop that was very popular, was a ‘t-shirt to tote’ upcycling activity. Students involved in this were asked to bring an old t-shirt to cut up and learn to upcycle into a cute tote bag. Our Lake Region Rangers had lots of fun making the bags, but probably had more fun playing around with the extra scraps of fabric. 

All in all, the TAG Team learned a lot about more ways they can get involved and take action within their community, speak up, act now, and be the change they want to see. It was a very successful trip and a very successful summit, and I’m sure the group will be attending next year as well.