"My three day visit to Besant Hill School was inspiring. Their community offers a dramatic example of how a leadership team can transform a school by elevating the mission of environmental sustainability."
Paul Chapman, Presenter at 2011 conference
"The information presented at the conference was valuable and thought-provoking, and the excitement of the students and staff sharing their many successes was inspiring!"
Ojai Valley Green Coalition Newsletter
Inspiration and Action Through Collaboration
Saturday, January 21, 2012
"I’d like to think… (we) have a generation of young people who are healthy, well educated, ecologically literate; and know how to be strong and powerful when they need to be strong and powerful, and tender and caring when they need to be tender and caring."
(Karen Brown, Creative Director for the Center for Ecoliteracy at the 2011 Bioneers Conference)
Through this busy time of year we, at Besant Hill School, have been working hard to shape an informative and meaningful Regional Green School’s Conference for Saturday, January 21. We are honored to host this event for the students and faculty from our schools in the California region, and hope that you will be able to make time to join us again, or, perhaps even, for the first time this year.
The theme for the conference, "Inspiration and Action Through Collaboration," is being driven by some of our enthused students who attended the Student Congress for Climate and Conservation (Sc3) over the summer, and the Bioneers Conference in the fall. These conferences inspired a positive vision of the future through a lens of personal commitment and collaboration that we would like to infuse and underlie the spirit of our own conference this year.
Some Speaker highlights this year:
Juan Martinez, Coordinator for the Natural Leaders Network.
We met Juan this year at the Sc3 in West Virginia. Juan works with the Children and Nature Network, a network cofounded by Richard Louv (Last Child in the Woods). As a youth growing up in East Los Angeles, Juan achieved his own personal transformation and has become an eloquent advocate for the gifts that Nature provides us. He is also a powerful spokesperson for the importance of cultivating an awareness and appreciation for the natural world in our lives and in our educational communities.
Dulanie Ellis, Documentary Filmmaker/Food and Agriculture Activist
As a local filmmaker/activist, Dulanie’s career path offers a rich story about the way that our work and our value systems can find common purpose. From a successful career as a Hollywood script supervisor, Delanie’s unfolding awareness for the inequities of our industrial food system guided her to a new career as a filmmaker documenting the importance of local and sustainable agriculture. Dulanie’s current work is a feature documentary: "Farmy,” about our returning veterans from Iraq & Afghanistan who are going into organic farming -- both to recover from the trauma of war and to provide food security for our country.
We have other great speakers on board for the conference this year that we will announce in the next update.
Morning and Afternoon Breakout Sessions this Year:
There continues to be strong feedback about the importance of including breakout sessions designed for our students and faculty to meet together to share sustainability practices and experiences:
- At least one breakout will be designed for our schools to share our sustainability programs, practices, challenges, and visions for the future.
- Watershed restoration
- Sustainable agriculture and permaculture
- Urban and small scale composting
- Turning work into play: The Grow Food Party Crew
- Integrating the Way of Council