This is my FaceBook post – I don’t want to leave out my friends that are not FaceBook users so I thought I would share here. (This weekend I’m sure I will have another post about this…explaining while this is drawing my passion right now.)
Friends – I’m tapping into your awesome brainstorming abilities to help me solve a problem. This has to do with the Flint water issue, specifically with schools in Flint where teachers are ensuring students have clean water.
Here’s the scope – I have many teacher friends inside and outside of Michigan. Several of them (or their classrooms) have indicated an interest in helping the students attending schools in Flint with fundraisers and drives for water.
I have a teacher friend in Flint. He and I talked Tuesday, and the bottled water donations are creating a NEW problem in Flint – what to do with all the empty bottles (if you don’t know from the low gas prices, Iran is dumping on the market, so all petroleum based products are cheap right now….meaning it is cheaper to make plastic than recycle it…meaning recyclying plants are dumping plastics in landfills right now). Another problem is that many filters that have been donated do not pull lead out of the water.
I’ve been brainstorming with several people – what if instead of bottled water, we did some fundraising and found a water service provider (such as Culligan) that would do daily fills to water stations in the schools? Another person asked, what if farmers had some of those large plastic tanks to put in place at the schools to store larger quantities of water so the school can use it in their kitchens as well? What other possibilities are there?
Other thoughts & ideas?
I see the biggest need being a reputable organization to act through (so money isn’t flowing through personal accounts – just safer for everyone). I’ve been told that concerning the plastic tanks – “National Guard has all of this! He said they can pull up and do this in under 2 hours. I said why are they not doing it? Politics… Waiting for someone to let them go to work.”
How can we (the people) move beyond the ridiculous “blame game” that is politically happening and actually HELP our fellow students, educators, humans?
Share away and let’s get some mass creative problem solving flowing….
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