Koolskools on the road again.

teaApologies to our regular blog readers for the recent radio silence! We have been very busy visiting schools, and participating in some exciting and enjoyable school-orientated events, one of which I am going to tell you about in this blog- the E.Y.E. ECO Summit at Worthing High School on 8 may. Then we promise to resurrect more regular blogging as the summer unfolds, because we have more interesting school visits to tell you about, plus of course the recently launched Fairtrade Foundation’s Fairtrade Cotton for School Uniforms summer campaign.

So we hit the A27 early morning from Southampton on 8 May to attend the E.Y.E ECO Summit at Worthing High School. We were very grateful to Polly Wise of Thomas A Becket School, our friends at the Littlehampton Academy and Karen Hayler at Worthing High for inviting us along and allowing us to conduct 3 great workshops with the school participants on the day.

The E.Y.E. Project (Eco, Young and Engaged) was set up in 2008 by Tim Loughton, the local M.P. His wish was to get local schools in his constituency together on a regular basis to focus on environmental/sustainability matters. There is no political sway to the event or the E.Y.E. Project.

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The EYE ECO Summit Committee organises the annual Eco-Summit on Tim’s behalf these days, because of his busy Parliamentary commitments. That said, Tim attended the whole day’s activities on 8 May, so he is obviously not taking his foot off the ECO Summit gas!

Over the years they have built up a network of 26 schools across Worthing and Adur, Primary and Secondary ages – Year 3 upwards. The Eco-Summit started with an opening assembly where schools briefly feedback the ‘green’ work that they have done over the last 12 months. There followed a couple of short speeches from local diginitaries.

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The children then took part in a variety of workshops which cover a broad selection of environmental/sustainability areas. That’s where Koolskools came into it. We ran 3 very invigorating and lively Fairtrade cotton/ethical trading workshops, during the first one of which we actually linked up live with our factory in Mauritius via skype so that the students could learn a bit about the practice of working with Fairtrade cotton from the horse’s mouth, so to speak! Around the text of this blog you can see some of the students’ drawings of what they see when they think of Fairtrade.

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A great effort by the organising Committee, and a special mention of Polly Wise who put life, soul and more into the organisation of the event, and deserves a medal!

More next week on our inspirational visit to Ratton School in Eastbourne!

Andy and Mike

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