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News about the Richard Pfaff Secondary Alternate Program's EarthCARE Team

The Richard Pfaff Secondary Alternate Program has a very enthusiastic and active EarthCARE Team. We are currently involved in:

  • Fundraising for tsunami disaster relief (we've raised $1500 so far, with a student population of fewer than 200!)
  • Recycling education and organization
  • Energy audits
  • LOCO (Lights Off/Computers Off) education
  • Replacing the secondary alternate program's plastic plates and cutlery with permanent dishes/cutlery bought at the Goodwill

Our plans for the spring include helping with the shoreline clean-up on the Gatineau River; we have signed up for tree planting as well.

We have also signed up as a Roots and Shoots group, which is the Jane Goodall-inspired global, environmental and humanitarian education program. There are Roots and Shoots groups in 68 countries, and its compatibility with EarthCARE made it an easy choice to "double up" for our EC team. As Roots and Shoots members, our challenge is to perform at least one service project per year as a group in each of the following three areas: Environmental, Humanitarian, and Animal Welfare.

Our EC activities fulfill the environmental component. For our humanitarian project, we will be doing a toy drive for children in refugee camps in Chad who have been driven out of Sudan. Later in the year we will be fundraising to adopt an orphaned chimp. Young chimps orphaned by the illegal bush meat trade are kept in one of two chimp orphanages in Africa, at the cost of $60,000 a year per chimp! This will fulfill the requirement for the animal welfare component.

The expanded focus has really fired up our EC team, and I would encourage any other teachers interested in promoting humanitarian and animal welfare compassion in your students, to ask your EC team if this is something they might be interested in. The web site is full of great service project ideas and registration information is: http://www.janegoodall.ca/rs/rs_history.html

Lawrence Keyte
EC Team Leader
Richard Pfaff Secondary Alternate Program