The Green Timberwolf

Wrapping it Up; The Final Blog Post

Blogged By; Poverty 2 Power

What an incredible and eye opening journey this has been, with much learned and many skills developed! Our group has worked so hard to help the United Nations complete their Sustainable Development Goal #1; End Poverty in all of it forms everywhere by 2030.  When our teacher Ms McLeod told us about the global goals project, we were thrilled to start something that would impact our community and world in such a positive way!!  We brainstormed many ideas for both our local and global goals, deciding that we wanted to do something unique to our school and class. The problem with picking poverty as our global goal was that it encompassed almost all of the other 16 goals, including the ones that are classmates were attempting to tackle. With this being the case, we didn't want to have a project similar to another group…

So, we decided to tackle our local action by making our very own documentary! All four of us had never made or edited our own video before, let alone produced an accurate and intriguing documentary! Before we even thought about filming, it was important to get statistics and do some research into poverty within our surrounding community. We visited the Angus Food Bank in late October, and interviewed the head volunteer, who gave us an insight into the needs within our area. We were so shocked to learn that 3,000 people use the Angus food bank every month. Doing some further research into Canadian Food Banks, we noticed that this number was very high for such a small community.  Since Angus is rather small, we decided to branch off, but not go any farther than the Barrie Area for our filming. We spent hours interviewing civilians from all over the Simcoe County area, asking them questions about poverty; what they noticed, ideas for solutions, situations they’ve been in and what poverty is to them. The answers and involvement from everyone was astounding! We worked hard to edit and perfect the documentary, to be shown at our premiere on December 11th! We had more than 100 staff and students show up, as well as special guests from SCDSB! The event was a great success- we talked about our take on poverty, some shocking stats throughout the community and what each student could do to help. When we showed the video, all of the students seemed to be extremely engaged, and they signed our prepared mission statement when they left. This made us feel great, knowing that the students had taken something away from our hard work and agreed to do what they could to end poverty in our local community. As Well, we had raised over $30 for The Red Cross, to help Syrian Refugees in our area and had some donations for us to take to the Angus Food Bank! How amazing!!!  Our favourite quote from our pre-movie discussion was from David Attenborough; “How could I look my grandchildren in the eye, say I knew about this and did nothing”.

In case you missed the premiere, you can view our whole documentary here;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iogkrh8lC14     

As many who have been following our World Issues Global Goals project know, we also needed to complete a global action to support our goal. Poverty is evident all over the world and affects every human's life in either an indirect or direct way… This made it so hard for us to think of a way to tackle our goal. When doing some research, we came across an NGO ‘Canadian Feed The Children’, which was a Canadian charity working both in Canada and in developing countries such as Uganda, Ethiopia and Haiti. We really agreed with the work that they do, as they really focus on “helping families help themselves out of poverty”. We decided to sponsor a village of 4000 people in eastern Ethiopia and to do this, we needed to raise $480. The funds would go directly to supporting programs such as equal schooling, businesses, agriculture and clean water. This seemed like a lot of money to raise in such a short amount of time, but we had a great fundraising idea behind us! We took the time to design our t-shirts, and sold them online for $20-$35, with 89+% of the money going straight towards our cause!! We had such a great response from the community, and we sold 55 T-shirts, making a profit of $500!! The money will be delivered to Canadian Feed The Children headquarters in the new year!! Of course, to make this campaign successful, we needed to have an educational component to it, explaining to people HOW their money will help! When the shirts are delivered in the new year, we will have an information sheet for everyone when they receive the shirt, as well as a hashtag so that each person can show their shirts off to the world of social media, with their reason for supporting the eradication of poverty! There’s so much in store for Poverty 2 Power’s Shirt campaign in the new year!  

Check out our Shirt Campaign here; http://teesforthepeople.com/products/poverty2power-1

Our goal was to educate others on Poverty around the world and in our local community, and we are pleased to announce that we think we have accomplished it!! The moment that was really defining for us, was when students signed the mission statements after our documentary premiere… This meant that they were committed to helping us end poverty, and that our presentation had meant something to them! During the process of our project, we learned a lot about teamwork, collaboration and dedication. Although these are important skills to learn, the most valuable lessons that we learned from this project were as follows;

• Be thankful for what you have…. So many families around the world do not have access to fresh water, let alone christmas presents for their family     
• Poverty is evident in all lives, either in a direct or indirect way… At some point in your life, you HAVE been affected by poverty
• Poverty is not always visible. Families may be silently struggling and it is important to be kind and understanding
• Local food banks and other aids are used a lot more than the average person would think… It is important to give what you can!!

For us, the overall experience was fantastic and unlike anything we had ever experienced in a high school class before. We felt as though we were really making a change and the amount of free reign that Ms McLeod gave us, allowed us to dream as big as we wanted!! At times, the project could seem frustrating, when something detrimental would happen, but as soon as it got back on track, we knew how important it was to complete this project, as it is an issue that we are all deeply passionate about! Throughout the project, we experienced many up’s and downs, as was to be expected with a project this big! We experienced a lot of problems with the shirt company, which could be very frustrating, as we knew that 55 people were counting on us to deliver these shirts.  Editing the documentary took a very long time, which was also something that held us back… But, at the end of the day, we are thrilled that this project was so successful!!

Thanks to everyone who supported us throughout the entire process!!

Photo Credits; Rosalyn, Mrs. Simpson, Canadian Feed The Children and Tee’s for the people