At the beginning of school all of the after school activities were indefinitely postponed including service, fortunately in the new quarter of school we are still able to participate in service online. The first service action that Alex and I, the service leaders of ReefKeepers, needed to do was introducing our service for new members. After meeting with Ms. Clover and Mr. Poulus to go over our ideas for this year, we created a recording a presentation as an introduction to Reefkeepers to inspire new members to join us. The video can be seen here.

After a week or so of recording the video we finally were able to meet our ReefKeepers group on the first day of service which was almost entirely new with students from grades 7-12. Meeting over zoom, we first introduced ourselves to each other to get to know the group and the possible skills that we have that could be helpful to the group. We went over the mission of our service group, the history of the group, and past projects that we carried out to educate our new members of what we accomplished so far and inspire new ideas for action. The subject of our first day of service was understanding the mission of our group and identifying what problems there actually are. Each of us posted what we thought mattered on a Padlet and using the ‘link’ option we connected similar ideas to one another. This then led to the formation of different categories of issues that we can potentially take action about. Additionally, we wrote a small mission statement for Mr. Polous

“We utilize advocacy campaigns, education initiatives and interactive experiences to work towards protecting our local and global oceans. Some actions have included: environmental clean-ups, local screenings of documentaries about climate change and ocean health, introducing reusable options to the community, upcycling plastics to keep them out of our environment and spreading awareness through infographic s and social media (paragraph from Mr. Poulus’ service learning document)”

In the following service session we brainstormed different possible actions we could take this year regardless of the restrictions that may be posed due to the coronavirus. These actions had to be derived directly from the areas of concern that we identified in the previous service session. One of the actions discussed was becoming an EcoSchool and achieving green flag status through the program. This action will not be a ReefKeepers only initiative but instead a community-wide student led initiative with volunteers committed to the cause. Mr. Poulus is leading this initiative and we learnt about it when joining his zoom call with the Recycling and Sustainability service group.

So far the meetings have been extremely successful even considering having to conduct our meetings online. The steps that we took in order to determine possible actions was something that we had not tried before and was extremely effective in making sure our action directly addressed a local or global concern related to our mission. The new members in our group have been dedicated to our service, contributing throughout the meeting and making is easy for us to be efficient. As we are addressing issues of global importance, I am excited to see what our service group will be able to accomplish in the following months.