At the Appleton School, there are a  number of different activities and clubs for students to partake in. One of the clubs is the Eco-Warriors. The Eco-warriors are the school’s environmentalist group who do their part in helping the environment. I was able to get a hold of the club’s founder, Hayley Navarro (35), who told me about the club and how it began.

“It started from the David Attenborough documentary…. [When] He released his life witness statement about how much the wildlife had deteriorated over his lifetime, and [how] he’d witnessed that first hand. I  think that documentary was really powerful and I  thought that we should try and… even if they are small things, we should all be trying to do those things to try and protect our planet for future generations.”

The club plays its part in helping the environment by giving educational assemblies to the different year groups across the Appleton School and by doing different projects such as planting trees; a project that took place earlier this year.

“We’ve had some big projects, we’ve done some tree-planting and so  for a while, our focus was on that.”

She added: “ We needed to go out,  decide where we were going to plant the trees, plot the areas, and we needed to do research about the types of trees we had. Once they were in the ground, they needed a lot of looking after… Our new project is about plastic awareness; it’s preparing assemblies, raising awareness, making posters and putting them up around the school, emptying out bins, and selling plastic-free sweets.”

Her favourite moments  about the club are when students show her their ideas  after being personally inspired;
one of the students has been working on a project about plastic in school uniforms and another student made an animation for the eco-warrior group.


Her hopes for the club:
“I  hope that the club continues to grow and that we get more students that want to come along.
My hope is that eventually,  the students decide  what projects they want to work on and they  come to me with their ideas about planet-saving activities and that I  am there to help and make them happen.”