When someone said Biggest Loser, I used to think of Jillian Michaels yelling as a person tries to run up a hill with 10 pounds strapped to their back. Now the first thing that comes to mind is Biggest Loser: Energy competition. Recently my school’s environmental club, Verterra, participated in the Biggest Loser: Energy competition and if I do say so myself, we ROCKED it!

First, we divvied up into teams of 2 and decided that each team would be responsible for filling out the first weigh in sheets for certain hallways. Then, we worked with our school’s administration to cover as many class rooms in our school as possible- almost 50 in total! In order to reach such a large amount of teachers, each team had to start putting in the extra hours. We had close to 30 students involved in the auditing and monitoring process. Very quickly it became second nature, one person manned the calculator and the other would interview the teachers. That way multiple people didn’t have to learn the ins and outs of the calculator. However the process of learning the calculator was made easy by Sophie, our ACE educator, who was always there to video chat or answer our frantic phone calls if we had any problems.

However, not everything worked out the way we planned. It turned out that with the very busy schedules our teachers had, not all had time to document their energy usage every day during Hit the Gym. What we needed at that point was a solution to keep them in the competition! Luckily, we devised the perfect solution: Our students would just ask the busy teachers to do something simple like turn off half their lights That way we could have as many teachers involved as possible, without asking them to add too many things to their already busy days.

We even ran a DOT campaign and raffle alongside Biggest Loser to get all of the student body excited alongside the teachers about going green. Everyday for a week we had various club members go speak to all of our access classes. We had each student fill out the DOT of their choice and upon completion we gave them a ticket to participate in our green raffle! That was we not only reached almost 50 teachers but we reached close to 2000 kids!

I’m proud to say, we did an amazing job on such a rewarding project: Through our team’s efforts, we can prevent 82,529 lbs of CO2 from entering the atmosphere in a single school year.  Considering how green our school already is, we accomplished a HUGE feat! Not only did we get school-wide recognition the Mayor of Warrenville has recently contacted Verterra asking us to join them on their project to green-ify their town!

However, what’s the most fun part of the project one may ask? Well, besides the great feeling of accomplishment, it is definitely the fun video we made alongside it! Our Verterra Video Productions created the video, An Irresponsible Truth. The video is about 7 friends bringing awareness to Reduce, Reuse and -Recycle. We take a lighthearted approach to giving students 3 easy ways they can make small changes in their lives that make a big impact.Enjoy watching!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9zlNl8H728&feature=channel_video_title