Accelerating to a Greener Future

As part of Greenwood’s Earth Week celebrations, we hosted an evening stewardship and sustainability event for parents and guardians on April 20. The event was a great opportunity to understand a little more about Greenwood’s personalized Land Acknowledgements and how everyone can make small changes to help the environment. The evening finished off with a presentation from Kevin Kimsa, a current Greenwood parent and managing partner at Climate Innovation Capital. 

 

The event began with Aubrey Campbell ‘24 giving the Land Acknowledgement. She then detailed Greenwood’s timeline and process for developing our Land Acknowledgement. Aubrey spoke about how the recent initiative to create personalized Land Acknowledgements allows for the Greenwood community to examine their personal connection to the land on which our school is situated. To create their personalized Land Acknowledgements, students and staff consult Native Land, an interactive map outlining the traditional territories and treaty lands of Indigenous peoples around the world. This resource allows us to double check and customize the Land Acknowledgement when our community is out on outdoor education trips or field trips. 

 

Cassandra Della Mora, our Stewardship and Sustainability Coordinator, led a ‘brain break’ activity for the attendees where everyone initialled the environmentally-conscious actions they currently take in their daily lives. It was very compelling to see all of the bingo squares chock full of initials. This fun bingo activity demonstrated that each person does not have to be perfect when it comes to sustainable habits, but rather that the sum of all of our efforts can lead to incredible changes. 

 

Discussing the state of the environment can be demoralizing at times, but our final speaker, Kevin Kimsa, gave our attendees a hopeful look at the future. In his talk, Kevin discussed how capitalism can actually drive innovations to reduce our carbon footprint and achieve a greener future. Through Climate Innovation Capital, Kevin has seen the myriad possibilities of what these innovations can do to minimize our impact on the planet. With many governments also increasing their funding into greener technologies, the industry will definitely see a spike in growth and hopefully guide the world to its net zero goal. 

 

We thank all our attendees for taking part in this thoughtful session! 

 

Here are some additional resources: