Covering an event

After spending a full year on the Anoka-Ramsey Community College Campus, I thought it might be fun to cover an event from a different college. I focused on finding an organizations event that I felt strongly about. Searching through the many events held on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus I found one that stood out.

Wisconsin Student Climate Coalition, otherwise known as WiSCC to the organizations members, held an event at a park downtown Madison, WI to try to recruit new members and let the group be known to new students.

WiSCC is a student organization that has many different leaders throughout all of the University of Wisconsin campuses. Their main focus is to introduce statewide climate change legislation and prevent global warming in everyday lifestyle changes.

At the park there were many snacks and appetizers for all the attendees. Everything was served on recycled paper plates, including the fan favorite large slices of delivered pizza. What better way to get college students to attend than free food?

For the first 30-minutes everyone mingled and enjoyed the food while looking over the printed brochures and handmade posters, which were all made on recycled paper. The written information was just a generalization of what was going to be touched on more in the meeting.

Once everyone got started, Laura stood in front of the large group of students to say a little bit about what the organization was all about. It was easy to tell how passionate Laura was about doing everything possible to prevent, or halt, global warming.

After expressing her strong feelings, Laura continued on by explaining the current project throughout the entire organization. Laura stated how right now WiSCC is “working on a petition drive to collect 10,000 postcards this semester across the state. The postcard states an increase of our renewable energy standard to 25%, and a reduction of carbon emissions 20% by 2020 and 80% by 2050.”

The crowd seemed to be into this project, it seemed simple enough to contribute. The few that were in an earshot from me definitely wanted to participate and learn more.

After the speech any interested members were welcome to go ask one-on-one questions with any present member. The numbers of curious students was larger than I had expected.

Many campuses do have organizations to protect the earth, which I think is a great and needed thing. The simple changes that WiSCC pointed out made it seem like everyone could contribute. Some ideas they shared included: buying recycled notebook paper, not using paper plates and plastic forks for everyday use, and energy conservation.

Attending this meeting was inspiring to make sure everyone does their part to get involved in saving our Earth.