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The Brentwood Green Team is a student run action group that aims to increase the environmental sustainability of Brentwood Secondary College. Our aim is to educate students about how their actions can affect the environment. The Green Team began in 2008, in a tiny box of a room, with only a small handful of students. Now, we have regular meetings, with over 30 members and the Green Team has become a recognised name within the school. The main purpose of the team is to create awareness within our school community about the current environmental issues that our world faces, and to make Brentwood a more sustainable community.

In 2008 we participated in Planet Ark Tree day where the students planted 80 native trees around the school. The Year 7 students participated in biodiversity workshops and at lunchtime we held an environmental fete for all to attend, which turned out to be a huge success. We implemented a paper recycling system for the classrooms, as well as running a 'nude lunch' in which students were encouraged to bring rubbish free lunches to school, as well as participating in Earth Hour for the second year in a row.

At the start of 2009, the Green Team held an Annual General Meeting. The purpose of the meeting was to bring together the Brentwood community to discuss a more sustainable future within the school. The afternoon included speakers from the Body Shop and Yarra Valley Water, creative presentations and speeches by members of the Green Team, and exciting giveaways. At the end of the meeting there was a discussion forum where teachers and parents were given the opportunity to ask questions and contribute their opinions, thoughts and ideas. The Annual General Meeting helped open up communication channels between all members of the Brentwood community.

The projects we have planned for the near future include improving and extending our recycling system, participating in the Solar Schools Program, increasing the biodiversity of the school, and running a student forum where we can discuss with other environmental student groups how we can all work together to extend our influence into the wider community. The green team is generally considered a successful and proactive student group. We are a sub-group of Brentwood’s Student Representative Council, and we receive a great deal of support and funding from them, which is instrumental to the success of the team. The members of the Green Team come from a range of different year levels, and they all bring their own unique ideas and skills to the group. All of the Green Team members are eager, dedicated and willing to cooperate in order to make a difference, and it is this common spirit that drives our team to do what we do. Ivern Ball once said, "Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it’s addressed to someone else." We aim to be the students who recognise that everyone has power to influence the current environmental crisis, and to work together to do something about it

Miss Nicholas and The Green Team

I began my teaching career at Brentwood Secondary College in 2009. As a graduate teacher I came to Brentwood with little teaching experience but had all the enthusiasm in the world. The first term of my teaching life was a whirlwind of confusion. Not only was I trying to establish myself as a teacher, I had to learn literally hundreds of names and processes that I had never been exposed to before. Before long I found my feet. I had started to become securer in the notion that I was doing a good job and was going to be all right. This is when I began to look at my surroundings and take note of the resources I was using. I was appalled to discover there was a servere lack of sustainable practice in the Brentwood community. I met with four interested students who had the same troubled thoughts as myself. These students were a fledging group that needed someone to help them redirect the college’s focus onto a more sustainable management of their resources. We started the Brentwood ‘Green Team’ and began recruiting like-minded students to help us make positive changes within the school.

We have achieved a plethora of amazing projects over the last 12 months. We held a ‘nude lunch’ and an annual general meeting. Both of these events increased our profile in the school and showed the management team that we were a serious organisation that could achieve amazing things. We participated in Planet Ark Tree Day, where we planted 80 native trees around the school grounds with the help of the Year 7 cohort. We implemented a paper recycling system for the classrooms and participated in ‘Earth Hour’ for the second year running. Furthermore, we attended some networking conferences to expand our profile to the wider community.

For me, the most important way to achieve all these projects is to make them student centred. I decided to take the role of a facilitator and a ‘guide beside’. I focused on teaching the kids appropriate leadership skills and fostering a sense of connectedness. I believe this approach allowed students to be empowered and have a real sense of ownership over the projects they completed. Moreover, I found that the group of 30 students soon became a close knit family unit that not only worked on projects together but socialised after school hours. For a teacher, taking a back seat and letting kids take risks and allowing them to make mistakes is extremely challenging. However, through gradual student-centred learning, that allows the students to have control over change within the school environment creates an opportunity for students to experience leadership, connectedness and real life learning.

Today, The Green Team is a student run organisation, 30 members strong. My role within this group is to facilitate and assist students achieve their goals, whether it’s a ‘nude lunch’ or recycling system. I set myself up as a ‘guide-beside’. Students can achieve a sense of empowerment and connectedness by executing self-directed student run projects. We held elections within The Green Team and a President, Vice-President, secretary, IT Team and Publicity Team. Initially, I thought this type of structure would allow all students the chance to execute projects that the majority of the group felt were important. However, in retrospect, I feel that this structure limited the number of leadership opportunities within the group. I conducted some research into how each member of the Green Team felt in regards to this structure. I found that a few students felt that their time wasn’t fully utilised and the senior members with the elected positions held all the power. Furthermore, I found that the majority of students continued to attend the weekly meeting because they felt connected and a sense of family. They build strong relationships and had the opportunity to use leadership skills to better their environment.