Go Blue Communities

I co-founded Go Blue Communities (GBC) with Kara Uemoto, and am the Vice President. GBC is a youth-led organization that empowers students by pairing education about local food systems in Hawaii with the tools to take action through advocacy and engineering. 

Through Go Blue Communities, I create and teach lessons about food insecurity, imported foods, local farming, and advocacy to fourth-grade students. I have taught over 350 students about food insecurity, local farming, and advocacy and I have created three lessons. This has allowed me to collect testimony from over 300 students to support legislative initiatives that would enable food banks in Hawaiʻi to purchase more local produce. I advocated for three legislative initiatives by submitting testimony and emailing legislators. 

We continued to partner with Mrs. Yoshikawa's class, and I organized a field trip for their class to visit the State Capitol building and meet legislators to become further exposed to the legislative process. I also created a lesson focused on the legislative process and advocacy to teach to Mrs. Yoshikawa's and Ms. Kelly's summer class on sustainability. 

During the advocacy portion of the lesson I teach, I inform the students what advocacy is and give a brief overview of the state legislature and bills. I give students the opportunity to write testimony on a bill related to the lesson and I compile their answers to submit as testimony (when there is a hearing) or to email to legislators. This activity is important to me because advocacy has been a helpful outlet for me to act on issues I am passionate about, but I wasn’t introduced to it until high school. I learned about environmental issues when I was younger, but I was never taught about actions I could take to address them. I developed a sense of anxiety and hopelessness when learning about these issues. Policy seemed like a distant, adult activity that I was too young to understand or participate in. To combat this, I am pairing education about local issues with introductions to actions students can take, such as participating in advocacy.