Earth Hour is a worldwide environment conservative movement for our mother Earth organized by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). This annual event intends to encourage individuals, communities, households and businesses to switch off their lights for just one hour, from 8.30pm to 9.30pm in order to show their commitment to this planet they are living on. It was first started as a lights-off event in Sydney, Australia back in 2007, but it has grown to engage more than 7000 cities and towns worldwide and is still expected to continue growing.
In conjunction with Earth Hour, Earthlink NTU, after months of planning, discussions and preparations, successfully launched an Earth Hour event on 19th of March, 2019. This project was only made possible through collaborations with many parties such as NUS Save and Ideaco; not to mention the contributions of our sponsors, with City Development Limited as our honorable Gold Sponsor. This was one of the largest events held by Earthlink in academic year 15/16 – which spanned from 9.30a.m to 9.30p.m. It is comprised of three main phases, each with a different tasks to be accomplished: namely Training Workshops, Outreach Program and the Night Event.
The event began with the registrations of approximately 50 passionate volunteers in NTU. The majority of them were from Earthlink NTU, but some volunteers are from other institutions like Hwa Chong Junior College. They proceeded to the Training Workshops where they were trained on how to reach the public and convey the messages in a friendly way. After the training workshops, it was the time for them to apply what they had learnt.
The volunteers left NTU by bus at 1.00p.m sharp, headed for the residential area of Jurong Spring. In the outreach program, the volunteers were divided into a few groups, with each group proceeding to different block. Over the course of 3 hours, they approached the residents to explain the purpose and benefits of Earth Hour, as well as encouraging them to participate by switching off their lights for an hour at night. In the meantime, the volunteers also reminded the residents about the Night Event which would begin shortly.
The Night Event began on 5.45p.m. It was the main draw of the entire event, where delicious foods, great performances, lucky draws, interactive games and goodies’ bags were provided to the audiences at just S$2 per pax. The foods were halal vegetarian in order to cater for everyone’s food restrictions, while being more environmentally friendly.
During the event, several booths were set up around the seating area comprising of registration booth to welcome the participants, and interactive game’s booths which intended to pass on certain environment related messages such as reduce, reuse and recycle, as well as energy saving tips. In order to promote the idea of “Bring Your Own Container”, a lunchbox was given along with a goodies’ bag to participants who had completed the booth games. Before the closing ceremony but after the lucky draws had been done, a countdown session to switch off the lights was initiated to mark the beginning of Earth Hour.
In conclusion, environment awareness is a necessary thing to be raised among the public. You might have no idea of how much waste is being generated by every one of us in a single year, but the resultant effects are incredibly detrimental. If we do not stop what we are doing and start changing, we are putting our lives and futures at stake. All in all, this event could be considered as a successful one, as the responses from the residents were overwhelming. This wouldn’t have happened without the active participation of all volunteers, the efforts of the organizing committee, the help from other parties as well as the sponsorship from various organizations. We would like to express our deepest gratitude once again to everyone who was involved in making this event a success.