GSI's Deborah Moore Wins 2010 Green Pioneer Award
In 2000, while volunteering at her kindergartner's monthly pizza day, Deborah Moore asked a casual question: "Where's the recycling?" The answer resulted in the creation of the Green Schools Initiative and hundreds of greener schools throughout California.
After helping fourth graders do an audit of the school's waste, Deborah soon discovered there was no recycling at her daughter's school, that the school was not addressing its environmental footprint, and that in fact, the entire education sector was way behind on the path to sustainability.
On December 9th at The Green California Schools Summit in Pasadena, Deborah, co-founder of the Green Schools Initiative, received the 2010 Pioneer Award in recognition of "the significant inroads she has made in promoting green culture within schools, based on the notion that a truly green school is one that considers its building, its operations and its curriculum." Read the official announcement.
Deborah got her start working as a parent volunteer to engage students and teachers at her daughter's school in reducing waste and promoting other green activities by integrating hands-on learning into the curriculum. In 2004, she co-founded the Green Schools Initiative to help ALL schools reduce their environmental footprint. To date, the Green Schools Initiative has trained over 1,000 educators, in at least 300 schools and districts.
Deborah accepted the Pioneer Award saying, "It can be hard to be a pioneer because you are often talking to people who don't want to talk to you, and trying to get them to do things that they don't necessarily want to do because it's not yet mainstream ... But look at us now -- we are not alone! The green schools movement has arrived."
She added, "If we want ALL schools to be green - the next pioneering effort is to pick up the pace, grow our movement and infiltrate the broader education reform movement. We have lots of evidence that green schools actually educate better than other education reform approaches. So, we need to build a statewide network that can better coordinate and amplify our collective efforts, promote policy reform, and share information so we can avoid wasting time and resources on reinventing the wheel. Together - through our schools and kids - we can grow a better future!"