Amira Odeh
Caring about environmental conservation is a passion that I’ve had during all my life and even a detail about some of my first memories. This was something I always thought I could do as a small hobby until I started to study at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus. During my early college years I got involved into the Eco-Environmental Society, a student environmental organization that allowed me to notice that students could have a significant voice over environmental issues. While participating in this group, I was approached by a professor who wanted to research about plastic bottle waste in our campus and was looking for collaboration from our group. This started in 2010, were we learned about the massive quantity of plastic that was consumed at the university and noticed that very few students knew about this.
One thing that made me feel uncomfortable about many projects on campus was the fact that great things were being studied, but no actions were taken later on in order to fix the issue that the participants were working on. Having this in mind, I felt that the plastic bottle issue was too important to stay only in a poster or document and decided to start No more bottles, an educational campaign about the environmental impacts of bottled water.
At the beginning I was putting a lot of effort on this campaign but I didn’t know what exactly I was doing. I felt stuck on educating and was insecure on how to move forward to action, how to engage more people in this issue or what exact steps I needed to take to have my campus join the list of universities around the world that banned the sale of bottled water.
Around the time I started to feel some frustration about this campaign, I learned that the 2011 Puerto Rico Sprog was accepting applicants. I read the description of the program and it mentioned exactly the leadership skills I was looking to learn. I applied, got accepted and was really excited to learn how to succeed at organizing.
This program opened a new world of opportunities and gave me all the organizing knowledge I needed to work on No more bottles and the Eco Environmental Society while also looking forward to pursue other interests in the environmental movement. During this week I learned all the skills I needed to allow the campaign and organization to succeed; like recruiting, managing volunteers, working with communities, fundraising, campaign planning and much more. This was also the first time I saw that I could professionally dedicate my life to organizing and the first space where I found a large group of people that shared my same interests and passion for conservation.
All the motivation gained helped me to go back to campus and help the organization grow. I succeeded in finding passionate volunteers and redesigning the No more bottles campaign to move forward in banning bottled water on campus.
The following years we worked extensively in education with a research background, addressing the issues that people didn’t know about and the areas of the campus where we had not previously worked. We evaluated whether our campaign was being effective and what actions were helping spread our message. Additionally, we worked on having more accessible tap water by petitioning to have new drinking fountains, cleaning these and selling reusable bottles. After gaining more support from the community, we wrote a proposal to officially ban the sale of bottled water.
Even though we had done a lot of work, we still had to wait a year until the chancellor of the university agreed to meet with us in October 2013. After this, the proposal received a lot of support from wonderful professors, students and the administration. Later, in October 2014, we celebrated our victory in becoming the first campus in Latin America and the Caribbean to ban the sale of bottled water.
Currently, we are looking to expand this to the whole University of Puerto Rico, which consists of 11 campuses. We also continue to work on education about the importance of reducing plastic use. In our country, tap water is safe and accessible yet around 60,000 plastic bottles are consumed each month on campus and many people distrust this resource. Bottled water brings a series of issues like water privatization, oil extraction, lack of regulations and BPA, but it’s most noticeable impact in our island is the large quantity of waste and the fact that we lack recycling at a large scale, as well as landfill space.
Having a successful campaign was no easy task. It took years of patience, of learning from mistakes and looking really hard for solutions to some problems. This could have never been possible without good organizing skills, good motivation, a network of support and a great team that cares deeply about the cause. I gained all of this after attending Sprog and through the connections I made during that week.
It doesn’t matter how difficult your cause may seem, there is always a way to start and a place where you can make a real difference for the environment and society. I invite you to apply to Sprog and give yourself the best opportunity to meet passionate people who will help you grow as a leader while also gaining the skills that will take part in helping you make the change you want to see in the world.