Wanna learn to keep chickens? // Earth Day South LA April 14

I blogged about the 2nd Annual Earth Day South LA in 2010 with great excitement (because I love this earth, it is so good to me), but this is my first year actually volunteering and attending the event.

Earth Day South LA
Saturday, April 14, 2012
11am to 4pm 

Normandie Avenue Elementary School
4505 S. Raymond Ave, LA, CA 90037
At the corner of Normandie and Vernon 

This event is FREE! Suggested Donation $5+
*No one turned away for lack of funds

Last weekend, I joined CSU with other volunteers to pound pavement to spread the word to the community surrounding Normandie Elementary where the festival will take place. This meant knocking on doors, talking to business owners, approaching anyone we saw on the street, and handing out the beautiful Earth Day flyers. I learned to invite people to the event in Spanish (very rudimentarily), which was great. It reminded me that I told myself to take a Spanish class a couple of years ago and never did.



Outreach that involves walking around a neighborhood talking to strangers in the middle of a hot Saturday afternoon was a lot more satisfying for me than outreach via email or Facebook. Even though I got sweaty and gross. I think I got really caught up in the power of social media in college (read: Facebook) to spread the word to so many eyeballs that I didn't consider that making an impact on a more intimate, smaller community scale is important, too. While wide-scale awareness is important, it's small-scale change that needs to happen that will coalesce into the sea change. I'm having flashbacks of the Oceanography class I took in college-- small oscillations of wind and water creating giant waves.

I'm looking forward the volunteering tomorrow for the setup of the event. Hopefully the ground will have dried out well and there won't be too many puddles to navigate. Funny, Neelam commented last weekend that "it's always the hottest day" when they hold the festival-- I guess this year might be an exception. Don't let it stop you from stopping by! There's going to be a bike parking zone (and valet!). And it's going to a be a plastic-bottle free event with water refill stations! These are things that excite me. Also, you should at least go and check out some of the cool murals that have been painted all over the school on previous Earth Days and other events. They're really wonderful. I took some blurry pictures with my not-so-great phone camera but will hopefully remember to take some pictures with my somewhat-better digital one and post them here.

[Edit 2012-04-19: I remembered, and I posted some.]