Go Green!

Ivy Tea Rose, Inc. ®

Go Green Initiatives

Ivy Tea Rose, Inc. ® recognizes that many communities in our service areas are not aware and totally committed to Go Green. As a fledging organization, our initial efforts are in the area of educating the community about various recycling efforts currently available to them.

We've met with the Public Works Director, Mr. Troy Attaway in an effort to gain resources from the City of Winter Park on how best to approach this initiative with the residents of Margaret Square.

Our first strategy has been to go door-to-door in the community distributing educational materials we'd received from the City of Winter Park.

Our second and most successful strategy to date has been to educate the children that participate in our mentoring program, The Ivy Rosettes.

Children are typically eager to learn new things. By tapping into that energy, Ivy Tea Rose, Inc. ® through our Ivy Rosettes program are encouraging each mentee the importance of reducing, reusing and recycling. We've done workshops with the girls defining:

• Being able to recognize the symbol for recycling
• Explaining the importance of replacing trees in our environment
• Providing a listing of what is and what is not recyclable
• Defining composting and how it could help the environment
• Making them aware of the things that they could do to help save our planet

We've introduced the students to the concept of organic foods and what they mean to them and the effects on their bodies. With this in mind, our next focus in this initiative is help the girls start a community garden.

As we look forward to this major project of creating a community garden, we thought we'd provide each of the current members of the Ivy Rosettes with their own flower pot and vegetable seeds. Each girl will take pride in raising their own vegetables from which her family will benefit.

This exercise will prepare our girls to be leaders when the time comes to start the community garden. It is hoped that each girl's enthusiasm would transfer to their family thereby encouraging the entire community to participate.