Over the past few months the Current Leaders worked hard to partner with businesses to spread our environmental agenda. To explore all our options, we contacted large commercial companies as well as small local companies. Some of the companies that we contacted included: Longos, Revitasize, Salon de elephant, Cyber mills Unionville Community Centre and local community centers in Markham. To successfully figure out which companies to reach out to the team worked together to highlights the environmental principles we most felt passionate about.
But before even breaking it down and before considering to work with only one business, we had to think about what theme we wanted. We brainstormed many ideas such as the following:
- Combating Nature Deficit Disorder in Youth
- Greenhouse Gas Reduction for Businesses
- Youth Education in Sustainability
- Disposal of electronics
- Local Business; donation of food, working with local restaurants/supermarkets on food waste
One of the principals the team shared was an overwhelming passion for waste reduction options and green initiatives that businesses can implement. Although out initial ideas on plans to do events outside of the business field, after our nature walk in the Rouge Valley park, and brainstorming the plan did not fall through, we eventually had to make the choice to drop the idea.
Thus, we were able to figure out that we wanted to focus on businesses and waste reduction and zero-waste initiatives. The team made sure to have a plentiful list of contacts and companies that we could contact in case of unfortunate declination from specific companies. In addition to company declination, we had to decline some partnerships due to optimization of time and late responses.
After a long brainstorming process, and discussion with the company on the goals and what we want done, we went forth with our plan. We initially brainstormed some green initiatives that the salon can do, but after some testing it failed and due to some unforeseen circumstances, we had to decide to cut out some initiatives. Later we wanted to create more initiatives, so we chose to purchase Terracycle boxes and to make women care packages for homeless shelters through green environmentally friendly products. It was a tough decision to figure out where to implement the boxes but we choice to do it at the Salon, civic centre and Lindt. We manually crafted the women’s self-care packages and re-used old bags that were donated to us that were still in really good shape and dropped them off at a Markham Shelter called Community Living York South and a Shelter Downtown.
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