The mission of Reefkeepers is to reduce the amount of plastic in our global oceans by working locally to reduce plastic use within the school community. According to Surfers Against Sewage, “every day approximately 8 million pieces of plastic pollution find their way into our oceans” and “there may now be around 5.25 trillion macro and microplastic pieces floating in the open ocean.” It is an issue of global importance and hits close to home as we live on an island.

This semester of Reefkeepers we started planning new initiatives that will take place next semester as well as continued projects from last year. One of our first new actions was the Global Climate Strike, the preliminary planning was done by us before expanding it to more of the school community to organize the event. This event then inspired the primary school to march around the school to protest climate change every Friday. Another action that we had started planning last year, however, had to delay it because of the April Attacks was the Neighborhood Sweep and Brand Audit. I spearheaded the action by planning the routes, collecting materials required and advertising the event. Another action we started the planning last year was for our Reefkeeper T-shirts. We sold the T-shirts at the Welcome Back Picnic, during lunchtime, at the primary production of Alice in Wonderland, and the secondary production of Oliver!. We sold out of the T-shirts and ordered more to be able to continue selling them to spread awareness.

The poster to advertise our T-shirts.

We also continued using our Instagram account that was created last year. Regularly I would share posts and statistics about our mission on our Instagram story to raise awareness.

A new action that we started this semester was Green Tips in the morning bulletin. Every week we would share a tip on how to be more environmentally conscious.

An example of a Green Tip that was posted on the morning bulletin. (Designed by Talia Shea)

We started the Plastic Free Campus project by meeting with different groups in school that could help us with this project. We also received an email from a student from the Nanjing International School in China who had heard about our service group from a teacher who used to work at OSC. She was interested in starting a sister group at her school as was wondering how we started the service group and what actions we have done. Reefkeepers might become international!

For our last session of this semester, Talia and I organized a collaborative reflection activity. I projected a table with four questions on the whiteboard and everyone in our service answered the questions as a group. The main thing that we decided that we had to work on for next semester was our organization and productivity during our service sessions.

Working to answer the reflection questions as a group.