St Clare's Abbey have reached the final of the UNESCO- Young Environmentalist Awards- This is an All Ireland competition. We have been awarded a place in the Finalists booklet and Peoples Choice Award. Our project summary (below) will be printed in the booklet.
Congratulations to the children who participated in the project and thank you to everyone who assisted them.
Our project is based upon the example set by St Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of those who promote care for nature and one of the saints to inspire the congregation of St Clare’s sisters. We wanted to lead the way in taking care of our world and help raise awareness of the importance of protecting our environment both in school and our local community. We built a greenhouse using recycled plastic bottles and used this during our school gardening club sessions. Our school gardening club was comprised of pupils and grandparents and we utilised the spaces in our school grounds to grow a range of plants, fruit and vegetables. We looked at ways of attracting insects to live in our school garden and forest. We studied the effect our carbon footprint has on our world and how this will affect future generations. We joined with a member of the Forestry Commission, to reach out to every school in our dioceses to help them become more aware of their carbon footprint. We planted a tree in an old shoe as part of an initiative entitled ‘Our Happy Footprint of Carbon’ as part of the tree shepherd project.com. We gave one to each school to plant on their school grounds.
