In recent years, environmental issues like climate change and global warming have become striking issues within our world as temperatures are constantly rising and natural disasters are more likely to happen. Although some progress has been made to combat the issue in recent years, a group of students at Malden High School felt that they and their peers needed to get involved too.
President Nora Hounain started the Eco Club with the help of Vice President Amber Benfield. Hounain wanted to help combat “trash turning into water pollution” as she noticed the amount of “trash in the parks and bike trails,” around Malden which would eventually end up in landfills or large bodies of water if not cleaned up. Social Media Coordinator, Merrari Flores joined the club with the intention to “become more involved with the topic of the environment in our school,” as she is involved with other environmental-related programs outside of school and wants to further pursue that interest.
Hounain also stated that the club wants to focus on keeping Malden as clean as possible, through creating an environmentally friendly community within the city which is why the club is mainly focusing on hosting citywide cleanup events to achieve their goal. Benfield added to Hounain’s statement by stating that she believes “there’s not a lot of communities for people interested in the environment… so we want to enlarge that so more people can come in and know about ways to solve its problems.”
In addition to wanting to create a space for people to get informed about what can be done with our environment, Benfield hopes to get in touch with the Malden Department of Public Works for them to potentially “donate supplies to us so we can use them to do our trash cleanups,” as the club has little to no supplies of their own right now. Hounain hopes the new club will be able to host future fundraisers like bake sales to “fundraise for our supplies and possibly, donate to environmental organizations,” to ensure that the club can support themselves and the greater cause.
The club is hosting its first meeting on Thursday, April 4th, in Mr. Berman’s room and will continue to host bi-weekly meetings. The club is set to announce its first event during the meeting on Thursday and the officers encourage future members to follow their Instagram, @mhs_ecoclub, and join their Google Classroom using the code ms43y4.
