and i'm thirteen years old and here to talk about my service project project depth and gift stands for jotting in plastic i'm in the most homes go dance program and for the nd half of our school year there we are told to start a service project so i took on project get from one of my friends and basically the mission is to decrease in on of plastic in the ocean by mostly education in the community but now i'm starting to expand it out  reciting in the city commission audience we were doing an agenda item on plastic pollution and i've been meeting with community members of about this for a long time and i understand many have met with you it comes up often of you know you see a lot of headlines about communities that are regulating certain saidee came down to public comment public testimony during that meeting and i was just wow by her presence she was so articulate and so brave i mean just in general let alone for her age but it really struck me just she really had a passion and articulation for her work that i respected and immediately wanted to get her information and find out more about her personally and her work after that meeting during the last fifteen minutes five over five million pounds of plastic have been thrown away in the united states alone this can not continue out of the norm of what we see and it's it's it's very you know so you know her worries yes so after th meeting we reached out to her and asked if we could meet so i could learn more about her work and so city came down with her mother to the federal building where i work in my office and we just chatted about the work i'm doing in the sustainability office and the work that she's doing around plastic pollution and her vision of more things she wants to do and we just kind of talked about ways we might be able to collaborate and work together so it was really nice to meet her and then soon after that i hosted an earth day celebration the city  you can have this one thank you so it's always something that she's been interested in and since we home school she was doing the advanced home school class arena and as part of that she was asked to do a service all the students were asked to do a service project so this was her service project last year i remember when i was little and i was playing in the sand with the sand toys and always came in like wash the plastic shovel away and i tried to like running got it and grabbed it and it will find it on the shore but then kind of when i started realizing what actually happened that kind of stuck out to me you know she had a lot of fun doing the the program through moat and then she did the world oceans  day program that they do at most and then also she did the shark days festival and i think just for through doing not and then getting some practice kind of in between those two events is when the beach run started and i think that's when it really clicked for her like hey i can take this out and do my own thing with this and take it further and i can really have some ownership to it and really help to educate the public on keeping our marine life safe there was i actually watched this documentary and this is like the main thing that i like i really want to do this it's a the over five million pounds of plastic had been dumped into the ocean just in the fifteen minutes i had been watching the show and i was and that was just in the united states and i was like freaking out i was like mom are you watching this and she was like yes that's scary and then i was like this is what i want to do i want to tell people what's happening she thought her whole sort of service project materials together came up with a little bit of a presentation a table display use for different events they are and then just decided that she wanted to carry on and continue on her own and she took it upon herself to go to the beach runs last year e mailed people at the county to ask if she could have a table there and present and do activities with the kids and they of course approved that so she went to many of the beach right and then she was then asked to come and speak at a city commission meeting  and so she went to speak in front of the city commissioners which was very exciting and then from there or she's just had lots of requests to come in to different events like this she's now speaking and doing presentations and some of the elementary schools with some other home research she's going around to many of the local restaurants and trying to encourage them to stop using that she started with plastic straws to start to rethink what they're using as far as to go containers and cutlery like i said made by  i've actually talked to a bunch of restaurants two of which have completely switched over they're using paper straws and they're working on biodegradable to go things so i'm very happy about that cd came to us saying that she was a like a service project outreach to restaurants to get a feel for what restaurants were doing to be more eco friendly to get rid of the bad five which is the you know goes through the star foam plastic bags single use plastic and it's something that's been important to us before we open this which like i said we've been here a year and a half we've been composting that always says cafe for years now this is all her like i said we you know of course as a family we had implemented ideas of recycling we recycle everything we can my husband has a business where clothing and salvaged type things are used in repurposed and sent to central america so again that's part of our overall kind of family the human what we do but this idea of keeping plastics out of the ocean she you know was introduced to it at moat and she just took off and she went with it and all her are thing well the st one is of course the fish an animal's  threatening or they could be injured another thing that i'm starting to get into research about now is when we eat the fish the amount of plastic that they have in their system if it is a micro plastic that nobody can see or if they're not injured nobody's going to be able to see that there is a micro plastic inside fish and here we are as humans eating salmon for dinner and we could be eating plastic and i mean i was i was giving that to to sick people and they're like see m kids have plastic in the hose like some kids may depending on if you eat this or not but i mean it could be destructive to us too if we're eating posix of course that's not normal food is not very good for our immune system and the same thing with animals but i was just so impressed that she was solutions oriented she was a youth that was out there doing things to make the world better you know and she was really willing to meet people who wanted to find she was hungry for information she wanted to learn and she was very eager to learn and find out new information in ways that she could do her work better and i just really respected her her dry if you know and really came across as something you can in the special c is kind of the tip of the spear or that you know the leader of her movement that it's like you know affecting her classmates you know changing their mentality like you know even the simple things like you go to starbucks to get a coffee bring a reasonable cup you know that's where without a strong you know those simple things as a young adult will then change their mentality going into their adulthood it won't be something they have to think about it will just be something that they when my girls were in public school they talk about recycling and reusing and reducing single use plastic but so that's not it was a force any type of a foreign concept to her but to see her take something that and that we had touched upon and talked about and we're implementing as a family to take her see something to see her take something on her own and just lost some and take off with it was really i mean it's just so i'm so proud it's so inspiring to see her be able to go speak in front of a city commissioner and not be nervous at all just amazing and me together as a community must do our part to save our oceans what would you like to see happen what your ideal i mean i know i was speaking with stevie the sustainability manager and  and i would just like to see even just a little change just a rule that you can only get a shot you ask for just a little something that starts pushing the edge so that we can eventually like the united states will start eight to transition i mean  years out from now there's a lot of work to be done until that one small town can always start even just educating people so that there's more people that know the e c u that can fight for the