Last Thursday 10th March, Southampton Greenpeace, along with a variety of other green organisations, attended the Upper Shirley Learning Community’s Green Fair.
This was an event where pupils from a number of schools (Shirley Infants & Juniors, Hollybrook Infants & Juniors, Upper Shirley High Secondary, Wordsworth Infants and Great Oaks) visited stalls in small groups throughout the day.
As well as highlighting the new Rainbow Warrior (how cool is that?) we focused on the Go Beyond Oil campaign, part of which, as you may be aware, involves taking the LibCon Government to the High Court to prevent the granting of further offshore drilling licenses.
This was quite a departure for us - not the campaign, we've done plenty of that - but the fact that most of our audience was between 7 and 12 years old... However, with the various musings about how to 'do' public outreach, this has to be important; our campaigns are generally only open to adults, so this was a great opportunity to enage youngsters - and to get or campaign messages into households that might not normally be aware of them.
As our campaign cards include a rainbow for decorating/colouring (and I had some sticky stars left over), the pupils were keen to descent on the tub of coloured pencil, and were genuinely interested in the idea of their designs being sent to a local MP (apparently some of the preliminary teaching included an explanation of what an MP is/does). Anyhow, the cards have now gone off to local MP Alan Whitehead so I'll wait and see what he makes of the large bundle of cards (135 in total, including a few from the grown-ups).
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