Environmental Campaign

Group’s name:   Smile at Earth

Group’s slogan: Love the world you live in…

Group members: Laura Stevenson, Paola Pérez, Luis Gabriel Mora, Samuel Casimiro.

Campaign topic:  Organize a campaign and activities to improve the conditions of a park and its surrounding area (the park you choose must be in such poor conditions that it does not serve its purpose as an entertaining and relaxing area).

 Who are we?

We are an ecological group who is in charge of improving the environment, specifically the parks, by organizing campaigns to restore them, because most of them are polluted. We want to raise people awareness about pollution in the parks and set them to help preserving them.

Member’s role:

Coordinator: Luis Gabriel Mora

Designer & funds manager:  Laura Stevenson

Language Checker: Samuel Casimiro

Secretary: Paola Pérez

Description of the Proyect

The place we have decided to work in is “the Barranquilla Botanical Garden ”, because it is a big area which is not as cleaned as it is suppose to be; there are also many vandal groups who take this place as a refuge for smoking and doing drugs, but the main problem is that many wastes from any kind of materials are laid here.

a.   Objectives of the activity

Our main objective is to raise people’s awareness about the danger their causing to the environment, due to the conservation and protection of flora and fauna is quite important.

b.   Justification

We are planning to plant trees in this garden for making it to be enhanced.  It was born on us the interest in taking this one because this area conform a very big place for environment (flora & fauna), so we cannot let it to be destroyed by many human actions.

Background research about other campaigns

Campaign’s name: “El yasuni depende de ti”

It is a campaign by environmental and social organizations of Ecuador whose main objective is creatively solves a threat as oil exploitation project Ishpingo, Tiputini Tambococha (ITT). All this is located in a highly vulnerable site: Yasuni National Park, so this activity is promoted by the campaign "Amazonia por la vida", supported nationally by several environmental organizations, and groups like: Ecological Action, the FEUE, organizaciones de base, the Academic Section of Environment, etc.

The campaign was carried out in 2007. The strategy was to do an environmental auditory about the park’s conditions in which it was concluded that the park needed a recuperation.

Methodology

We will use oral presentations, written presentations, in this case would be the flyers; virtual aids like facebook, the blog, and last but not less; we will take action by giving example to all the people close to the area. How?  By cleaning the park as much as we can. We already know that the park is too big, so we will take a little portion of it, and teach people to clean it, thus they will clean parts we did not.

Strategies

This campaign will be held with different activities, so we have required our designer partner in our team to lead us in the possible ways we can present this campaign to be visible to all.

We will be giving little speeches in the houses close to the botanical park, we will be teaching people not to throw garbage in the surrounding areas.  Besides we will be posting many activities and messages throw the most social network ever existed. (Facebook) this tool will help us to portray our blog and there in the blog many people will see the activities, information about the park, the presentations; and many other stuff we will be adding there in order to involve many ones. 

Instruments to be applied 

The instruments we will imply to attack the problem of pollution and wates thrown in this park are: first we will use public boards with the following information “It´s not allowed to throw garbage”.

How other people will be involved     

As we have read before, involving people will be one important action, because if we will be giving speeches and handing flyers out, those activities will be directed to people who live in the closest area to the botanical garden.

Submit by http://www.amazoniaporlavida.org/es/Noticias/en-el-oro-inician-campaara-conservaciel-parque-yasun.html.

AGENDA

We went on March the 27^th in the afternoon.

We went to the park and we made an evaluation of how bad was the park’s condition. We could see the amount of pollution that was there, also the creek is contaminated and even people who live near fish here. Besides a great numbers of trees are in bad conditions that is what we saw when we got there. Despite of our analysis we also talked to the environmental police who was the one in informing us about a school who is planning to reforest the park, while we were talking to him, he explained us how the things work there and we agree with him to come to get together with other people who have the same idea and make a big help to the park.

We return to the park on April the 9th we started our activity; we made a reforestation. We could use many trees in the park that the environmental police had there. The reason to this activity goes beyond having fruits trees, we did it because the environmental police want to free many animals in this area but they don’t have food and the animals would die, so a good solution to that problem is reforesting with trees with plenty of fruits.

Our third visit was on April the 10th we made an excellent advance of our job in the park. We met a group of girls “amigos de la naturaleza” and students of institute of SENA. They were all there to help cleaning the park up. So we were so happy for it and we also helped to clean; besides this is one of our purposes (cleaning the park). Also we invited the community around the park, neighbors and people to contribute with the cause, which is also one of our purposes (raising people’s awareness). The police went with us house by house in the area which surrounds the park informing and asking for help to clean the park.

In April the 20^th by the morning, we went to the park to celebrate the International Earth day. We invited the community around the park, and the groups who had previously worked. Then, we made a chat with them and we explained the importance of conserving the park. Also, we were able to interact with them about pollution and how we could attack it: we taught a few useful tips for recycling, reforesting and reducing energy consumption; these were the main issues for the preservation of the earth and our subject of discussion.

Next On 9th May, we will bring our experience to the University in which we will present a report to the “Uninorteña community” about the park and its problems. Since many people do not know that there exists a botanical garden in Barranquilla, we are going to make visual materials such as brochures or flyers and posters. The purpose is to raise young people awareness to continue working for the welfare of the park that belongs to everyone.