Featured Hero: Chloe Maxmin

Posted by Gabe on July 29, 2009 under Featured Hero, Kids are Heroes | Be the First to Comment

This week’s featured hero is Chloe Maxmin, a teenager who works tirelessly to improve the environment.  She is also a bit of a social entrepreneur in her tactics which is another quality I admire. We are so proud to have her as part of the Kids Are Heroes family. So, without further ado let me introduce you to Chloe Maxmin in her own words:

The Climate Action Club is coming to the end of our second year of operations. We worked on many projects this year. Most importantly, we moved into the action phase of our reusable bag campaign. In the fall we began an outreach effort in our town to inform local citizens about our work. I believe that education is the key to motivate people to act. I created an 11-minute movie entitled “First Here, Then Everywhere”, which illustrates how plastic bags harm our environment. (You can see it on YouTube!) I also created two fact sheets with data about the negative impact of plastic bags. We used these tools to inform the merchants and community members. My analysis determined that, based on conservative estimates, we can eliminate at least 671,000 plastic bags annually, which equals 4.8 x 10^10 lbs of CO2 and 398,930,400 BTU’s.  It means fewer bags in our landfills each year leaching toxic chemicals into our soil and harming local wildlife and marine life. Our local community cable channel agreed to air my video “First Here, Then Everywhere” several times a week. I also developed a relationship with our local newspaper for a standing headline and semimonthly column for the club. I have authored several of these, and have invited other club members to contribute.  We also have guest writers.

Merchants began to sign our pledge cards, committing themselves to the goals of our campaign. We stood outside local shops to hand out our fact sheet along with free canvas bags to shoppers. Together these efforts created community-wide awareness and support for our campaign.

Early this winter, the CAC organized a merchants’ meeting. We invited all local merchants to attend a meeting to discuss the campaign and reassess the best possible course of action. CAC members ran the meeting. We showed the film, “First Here, Then Everywhere”.  Former Maine representative Ted Koffman, who pioneered legislation for reusable bags, and Suzette Bergeron, an expert in reusable bags, were our guest speakers.

The meeting was a success. There continues to be enormous support for a town-wide reusable bag. We discussed the economics of the campaign and what type of bag we should use. We decided that a sturdy but non-expensive bag would be optimum.

During this time the economic crisis was growing and hitting the local merchants quite hard.  I understood that this made it difficult for many of them to invest as much as they would have liked in our bag campaign.  In response to this situation, we decided to  slightly alter our strategy.

In March I learned that I had won the Prudential Spirit of Community Award, a $1000 prize given to one high school student volunteer in each state. I decided to use that money as a challenge grant for the reusable bag campaign. We opened up the sponsorship process to individual citizens and other community organizations, as well as the merchants. The challenge grant was announced at a school assembly, in our newspaper column, and also covered in a news article.

I spoke to many local groups during the late winter and early spring. By early May we had raised $3500 in response to the challenge grant. We have purchased our first installment of ~2000 large polypropylene bags made of 20% recycled materials, which we will sell for $2.00 in local shops, the library, at school, and elsewhere. The bags will have a town logo on one side, and logos or names of sponsors on the other side.  All the proceeds will be reinvested to buy more bags. This will establish a permanent fundraising effort to continuously recruit more sponsors, so we will have a growing revenue stream to invest in more bags. Finally, I am continuing to apply for grants in order to raise more money for this effort.   With 2000 bags to sell, we can afford to give some away at Senior Homes, or sell them at a discount price at local events.

I have established a relationship with a company that recycles #5 plastics, including our polypropylene bags, and turns them into durable, recyclable, kitchenware. This means we can offer a way to collect and recycle our bags when they begin to degrade.

Through our column and other means (emails, handouts, local television, radio, and elected officials) we will educate people as to why they should reject plastic bags. This is a concrete behavioral change that reminds people on a daily basis of what is at stake for our planet. As tiny Damariscotta joins San Francisco, London, and China in this effort, we will make the case that every individual and small town has a giant role to play in the fight against global warming.

Chloe Maxmin
Founder and President
Lincoln Academy Climate Action Club
Founder www.firstheretheneverywhere.org