This is a guest post by Adam Wong, student at Laguna Hills High School. 

When I first heard that the next ACE Leadership Training was going to be held at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, I was like, “…sweet…” As a lover of dolphins and being quite like a fish myself,(being a swimmer and all) I was more excited about exploring the aquatic zoo than sitting in an insignificant, uncomfortable, and just plain boring classroom all day. It didn’t take long, however, to discover that I was utterly, absolutely, downright wrong.

My trusty sidekick, Tristan, and I arrived at the entrance of the aquarium and stumbled upon a curious group of some 40-odd young people with green t-shirts, smiling faces, and of course, reusable water bottles. A very amiable ACE educator Sophie called to us, “Come over guys, we’re just getting started!” We found the leadership conference.

We partook in a simple icebreaker game and became immediate friends with most of the students there. We chattered as we walked through the aquarium to a simple building next to the shark lagoon. As we filed in, another ACE educator, Kristina, greeted me warmly. Through our interactions in previous ACE functions, we became pretty close. The students sat down, peeled and glomped down the provided Cuties™©®, and the conference started.

The idea of Leadership Trainings are to provide the perfect environment for you and your action team to succeed, and the ACE trainers did a wonderful job at that. This green groupthink was held in an aquarium, a place dedicated to educating the public on the importance of conservation, which really set the mood for what we were doing. It was also pretty cool that we worked in a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) recognized building with a green roof (I was disappointed to look up and see that it was brown) because it set the same mood.

Because this Leadership Training was focused on jumpstarting the Biggest Loser: Energy competition, the ACE educators utilized fun and creative ways of teaching students how to correctly tackle the challenge. Using skits, everybody learned and practiced how to get busy, bored, and peppy teachers to participate in the competition. There was a useful slideshow that showed step by step how to record and broadcast data to show off to ACE. They also gave us cool watt-measuring instruments appropriately dubbed “Kill-A-Watts” to further aid us in reading energy usage in class rooms.

Quick lunch break: avocado, tomato, and onion sandwich, bean paste patty sandwich, spicy Chik’n sandwich, chips and salsa, and all the blueberries you can eat! Boy they feed us well.

Perhaps the most valuable asset provided to us at the Leadership Conference was the concentration of like-minded people. As an eco-fanatic, I know how tough it can be to be surrounded by people who just don’t care. I’ve had times where I’ve wanted to just throw it all away in frustration. But once you get to one of these trainings, your world just brightens up. You realize that you are not alone and that these ACE people are there to help you because they want to see you succeed. The students who
are there with you share their troubles, successes, and support. Even though all of the teams were competing against each other for ACE’s Biggest Loser: Energy competition (and the yummy $100 grant), we were united in our cause for a greener world.

In the long car ride back home (don’t worry, I carpooled) I thought back to the events of that day. I had made new friends that would support me in my green endeavors. I had learned about new ideas to save more energy at my own school in South Orange County. But most importantly, I changed my little idea on how to make my school a little greener into big plans on how to do some major power saving. With willpower and effort, dreams give way to goals, which in turn give way to successes. This past ACE Leadership Training helped me make my dream come true.