Environmental Advocacy

Anna Labbe

keep freeport clean

JUNE 12, 2018

This is my project dedicated to the Environmental Advocacy AP project. This is a project made by AP with WE and the goal of it is to make a project with a local goal / action in mind, in order to better the Earth and the people living on it. I decided to make the natural environment project, and focused on a problem locally that I had noticed. One of my "pet peeves" or one of the most frustrating things to me in regards to environmental keep-up / activism is litter and the amount of human waste that affects our world and community. Since Freeport has a very prominent downtown and a medium-sized population, there are always a lot of people visiting and living in the city. Because of all the shopping and all the the tourist-ing that happens in Freeport, there is quite a bit of litter in downtown Freeport and natural places such as Winslow Park. This is dangerous in addition to unattractive because since Freeport is a coastal town, this trash can get into our ecosystem and damage the land and water in addition to the animals we fish and eat.

For my project I decided to do something that would raise awareness to this issue in Freeport in addition to raise money to go towards the cause. I did this buy making 12 limited edition screen printed bags. I made the design myself, and it is a simple drawing of the coast of Winslow, with the words under it "keep freeport clean". I wanted to keep this bag very organic so I bought some tan canvas totes and screen-printed the design in olive green ink to give it a "go green" vibe. I then posted an ad on Facebook and Instagram, stating that I was selling these hand-printed bags for $8 a piece, and two of them were sold for $5 dollars because of smudging or faded ink. I ended up raising around $80.00 for this cause because of people buying the bags and then some people generously donating an extra dollar or so. Once I collect all of the money, I will donate it to keepmaineclean.org, which is an organization that spends time cleaning up Maine's natural environments and has specific stations in specific cities centering on that community and how they can clean up / raise awareness for waste in natural environments.