Help me raise money for people who raised me up.
Hi Tumblr, Its been a minute, here's what I've been up to. When I graduated from high-school, my sense of self-esteem was at what I discovered to be an all-time low. I went to college unsure of whether or not I was a person who was worth taking the time to know. As I immersed myself in the culture of my school I was slowly challenging these notions but I couldn’t cast out the idea that I didn’t add value to the world. Then I got involved with the Student Environmental Action League (SEAL) I found some scrappy upperclass students looking to make a difference. I started to throw myself into this work, which was great and fulfilling, but it often still felt lonely. That was up until years ago we (note the shift from I to we) attended the first ever Students for Zero Waste Conference put on by the Post-Landfill Action Network. Suddenly I was surrounded by hundreds of passionate students who shared struggles like mine, we leaned on one another, shared stories, and didn’t sleep for the entire weekend. I remember crying, feeling like I had found a community that I could trust and depend on.
I was ignited. My loneliness bloomed into a the desire to create community and avenues for tangible change within the environmental movement. We were making committees within the club to better organize or within our student government to address sustainability We were helping to build a new non-profit called The Flower City Pickers at the Rochester Public Market that now recovers up to 9,000 lbs of food per week for redistribution to shelters 15 and pantries around Rochester, NY. We pushed back against the privilege and wastefulness of the college experience by creating a program called Goodbye Goodbuy to recover 35+ tons a year of usable furniture, electronics, textbooks, clothes, etc. and save students and families thousands of dollars by creating a move-out collection move-in sale program. I didn’t notice it happen, but sometime during this process I found the right reason and decided that I wanted to live.
I’m typing this from the Post-Landfill Action Network office in Dover, NH. I work here now, alongside the people who created the space where I found my passion. This week is my birthday and I’m donating it to them using a fundraising platform I’ve provided a link to. If you’re in a position to do so, I hope you consider supporting them and supporting me as we try to create a world worth sharing shared well.
