Our Lady of Guadelupe High School Wins $10,000 Climate Action Grant for Sustainable Sewing Project

Ljay Wade, Cayo Correspondent: The Our Lady of Guadelupe High School in Belmopan has been accepted by the Belmopan City Council as one of the recipients of the Youth Climate Action Fund grant sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies. The student body of OLOG High applied for a grant under the City Council’s Youth Climate Action Fund grant and was awarded $10,000 to launch their sustainable sewing program.

Jaminie Morales, Junior Lead: “As an honor roll student, I have felt  the need to be involved in many  extracurricular activities  and finding out that I could be a part of a sewing program and a program that helps to teach others about sustainability,  it has helped me improve and I feel the honor  to be one of the leads to help  them develop more on this topic, to help them develop more  and know more about what they can do with fashion and  sustainability. Our goal for this project is for everyone,  all our students,  since we will be doing 20 students per semester, we want them to understand that they could be sustainable, that whatever uniforms they don’t use, that they could teach themselves to sew  if they have extra clothes that they do not use instead of just throwing them away, that they could reuse them and create art out of it.”

Ljay Wade, Cayo Correspondent:To kick off the sustainable sewing program, a two-day workshop at the high school launched today talking about the importance of sustainable sewing practices and the negative effects of fast fashion in small island developing states such as Belize. 

Vanessa Ken, 3rd Former: “Our workshop basically started on the topic of ending fast fashion  because we wanted to stop all the  how it’s affecting the global and our environment because of all its polluting  and  it’s  just harming our environment and we wanted to stop that and it seems like it’s not going to go to an end anytime soon, so we want to put our foot down and say, hey, this is really a problem. Water is how these factories are dumping their excess scraps into the water, and how it’s just polluting the environment there and all the animals that are in that water and et cetera.”

Gabriel Eck, 3rd Former: “I think this is a great initiative because we are the younger generation and we need to make a change because the future is ours and I believe we need to have a good environment for like good minds, right?  Because the environment greatly, oh it contributes to your mood and your emotions. The fast fashion that we’re trying to stop is greatly polluting our environment in many ways because fast fashion contributes to global carbon emissions and it also  contributes to polluting our environment through  landfills  and through  polluting our rivers and our ecosystems there.”

Ljay Wade, Cayo Correspondent:Today’s workshop was held under the theme  Awareness and Inspiration,  Fast Fashion  and Our Role in Change. Reporting for Love News, LJ Wade.