Students in the Carmel High School Sustainable Living Club created a pollinator garden for butterflies, bees, and birds in the CCS Plots to Plates Community Garden‘s meditation area. This garden, planted with perennial plants native Indiana, will increase biodiversity in our area through providing a habitat for butterflies and other pollinators and will serve to educate our community.

The University High School EcoBlazers complimented their Carmel Green Teen funded community garden created last year by creating and implementing a composting system and building a multi-purpose rain harvesting structure. The students and staff will compost school lunchroom waste for use in the community garden, and the rain barrels adjacent to the new structure will provide needed water for their teaching garden.

Girl Scout Ciara Pickering chose to educate elementary aged students about preserving the environment. Students learned about recycling and other various ways to preserve the earth through hands-on activities and crafts at Forest Dale Elementary in conjunction with the Extended School Enrichment (ESE) program.

Members of the Carmel High School Do Something Club thought that too many kids these days are not doing much to help the environment, so they created a lesson plan about the benefits of trees for the 104 first graders at Smoky Row Elementary School. Their lesson involved an interactive PowerPoint, singing, prizes, and a tree seedling for each student.

The Carmel High School TEDx Club organized and hosted a TEDx Conference that took place on April 19, 2014. This conference was based upon the official TED layout with multiple speakers talking for 18 minutes or less. A portion of these talks and videos discussed environmental sustainable living and how to implement simple practices in daily life to minimize one’s environmental impact.