Alicia Wong is a senior at Edward C. Reed High School in Sparks, Nevada. She is president of the Reed Eco-Warriors and an ACE Climate Action Fellow.

Hello everyone! My name is Alicia Wong. I am the president of the environmental club at my school, Edward C. Reed HS in Sparks, Nevada. I am also a Climate Action Fellow at ACE. I am going to start a monthly blog about my experience of being an ACE Climate Action Fellow and how I balance that with my work in my club to my school work. Each time I write, it will be a little different. With each blog post, I hope it inspires you and encourages you to do what you love!

For this first post, I wanted to talk about my club. You might have heard about us, we are the environmental club at school, Eco-Warriors! Our club is one of the most active clubs at Reed. With the help of our advisers Metcalfe and Morehouse, we have been able to accomplish many great projects in the school: greening our school bathrooms, installing a water-bottle refilling station and making our school Idle Free. Sadly, Morehouse is no longer an adviser because she took a job teaching in Egypt – amazing!

One of our latest accomplishments is the recycling bins we got from a grant, the Coca-Cola / Keep America Beautiful Recycling Bin Grant. It took us about three years to get accepted for the grant, but this year we finally got it! It turned out the key was to partner with our local Keep America Beautiful (KAB) organization, Keep Truckee Meadows Beautiful (KTMB). If your school wants to apply for the grant, see if you have a local KAB organization to partner with, too.

Our New Recycling Bins!

Over the summer, the officers (Issac Echegoyen – Vice President, Omar Kamal – Secretary, and Diego Rios – Treasurer) and I went to school to label all of the bins. Now, we are distributing them out to teachers. They are so excited when we give them to them! We are almost finished; we just have a few more to pass out. We also have to work on a plan to collect the recycling from the bins – more on that to come. Thanks to KTMB, our school is more green!

I couldn’t have been more proud of my fellow Eco-Warriors for not giving up hope. Without them, we wouldn’t have gotten the grant. I couldn’t see my life with out the Eco-Warriors.