Wednesday, June 11, 2014

2014 Annual Report of the Green Team



2014 Annual Report of the Green Team

The Green Team is an ad-hoc committee within the Church. Its purpose is to promote good environmental stewardship in the church's facilities, and also in our homes and the wider community. Its activities include reducing energy consumption, and promoting the Three R's (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle).  The committee also works to raise awareness and foster action on Climate Change. We love people to bring new ideas. Everyone is welcome to participate!

On October 19th, we had our 2nd annual Harvest Dinner and Cookoff, a vegetarian/low impact pot-luck dinner and cook-off in fellowship hall. It was preceded by an Indian food cooking demonstration by guest participant Anil Navkal.

On February 23rd, in conjunction with Interfaith Power & Light’s Preach-In on Climate Change, we conducted a green service with Thomas Arnold preaching, and with a number of the children and youth reading and performing.

We hosted a Sustainable House of Worship workshop on May 17th, with presenters from Interfaith Power & Light, for people of all faiths to learn the best ways to reduce energy consumption at their houses of worship. This was attended by more than 30 members from 16 different congregations in the area. In addition to support from the American Baptist Churches of MA, and the MassUCC Conference, it was also supported with a generous grant from South Church’s Seeds of Faith fund.

On May 11th, Terry Ebner and Iric Rex had an outdoor children’s service with a theme and music of sustaining God’s creation.

We created a Climate Reader, a magazine-style collection of articles to serve as a starting point on climate change, what needs to be done, and how it can be be solved. We also created a South Church Green Team blog to share the Climate Reader at http://southchurchgreenteam.blogspot.com

We started the “Green Thing of the Month” this year at fellowship hour on one Sunday each month, where we encouraged one aspect of green living, everything from worm composting at home to affordable LED light bulbs.

We helped make the all-church picnic a “green” event again this year by setting up and demonstrating how throw away trash can be greately reduced by composting food waste, paper products and recycling. And that it’s easy to do once you see how!

We had a “green gifts” table in Fellowship Hall during Christmas season.  The proceeds from this sale went to support South Church's membership in Mass Interfaith Power & Light.

Co-chairs Mark Bohrer and Candy Dann