Yearly Roundup: What did we do this year?
Posted on December 8, 2018
As we get into December and people’s schedules get busy preparing for the end of the year, along with all its celebrations, holidays, and general winding down, we start to get a little reflective at Green Calgary. This year has been a busy one for us, with us growing a lot in 2018. We have a lot of exciting programs and announcements in store for 2019, but until then, let’s look at some of the accomplishments of this year!
Winter 2018
Our winter season was dominated by the Green Calgary Bag Share. This was a first attempt to help redistribute reusable bags to those who needed it that Green Calgary has done in a long while, and we were blown away by the success! Our aim was 100 bags, maybe 200 if we were really lucky. We collected over 500 reusable bags! This was a great success, and it allowed us to offer bags to customers at our EcoStore, as well as those who joined us for events. In both cases, we sometimes got even more bags out of the deal, as people came back to drop off their bag plus extras!
Spring 2018
Our busiest season, we call it the Green Season, kicks off with our annual Rain Barrel Sales, plus we had our environmental celebration and AGM! We also launched a speaker series that brought new topics and faces to Green Calgary, and we attended a plethora of events, environmental fairs, and workshops, including Seedy Saturday and the Calgary Horticultural Society Garden Show (perennial favourites of ours – pun intended).
Summer 2018
We had an exciting summer season, with the Energy Revolution Fair continuing to be a highlight. The fair is a learning event for students grades 5-12 and includes a science fair component. This year, with the help of the Alberta Emerald Foundation and SAIT Green Building Technologies, we were able to award the top student team $1250 for their school, plus a Prototype Fabrication Allowance from SAIT to develop their idea further. Mayor Nenshi came down to congratulate the winners, check out the grounds, and learn about the fair, too! We also launched new pollinator programs and a lot of different collaborations! You can check back in our blog from these months to see just how busy we were!
Fall 2018
Now we come to the fall, and the big focus here was Green Calgary’s 40th Anniversary Celebration! We were able to pull together info about our history over the past 40 years, as well as offer our programs to everyone who was able to come by! We had community collaborators on site as well to talk about zero waste, green products, sustainable fashion, and so much more! It was a great way to celebrate everything Green Calgary has been able to achieve in the past four decades. It was also the launch of our Every Action Counts fundraising campaign, which is ongoing even now.
We were able to gather 11 impressive Action Ambassadors – Calgarians who do little things in their everyday lives to reduce their negative impact on the environment, from athletes to TV personalities to industry representatives and even a grade 12 student! It shows a great breadth of people and what they can do when they commit to doing just a little every day. Go check out EveryActionCounts.ca and watch the video tips from all the Action Ambassadors and make a donation! Your donation to will help to ensure that more than 70,000 Calgarians have access to the very best environmental education programs next year.
That’s a whole lot for the year! We expect that we’ve been seen around Calgary, between advertisements, events, and education programs, more than a million times this year! We’re really looking forward to what else we have in store for next year and hope to reveal things to you soon! If you want to keep an eye on what we’re doing, make sure to follow us on social media on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
