The Go Green Club at HC has found many ways to help improve sustainability and the environment around HC and Lexington. 

“Go Green Club is a student-led group that focuses on promoting sustainability at HC,” Go Green Club President Emery Elkinson explained.

Elkinson has been a part of the Go Green club since her freshman year at HC. As a senior, she is now the president and has created new initiatives for Go Green club this year to help the club become even more active in the community. 

“I would say the main objective is to make sustainability a priority in HC by advocating for better practices,” Elkinson said. 

Go Green Club has made it a priority to draw attention to sustainability issues HC faces due to a prior lack of initiative to improve the issues, such as HC’s recycling initiative. Go Green Club can now better work to improve HC now that the club has grown. The club has had a large number of people show interest in joining and many of those who were interested have gotten involved.

“There are 100 people in the Go Green Group Me meaning that they showed interest,” Elkinson explained, “but usually about 25-50 people show up to each meeting.”

This is a drastic improvement from the state of Go Green Club of Elkinsons freshman year. 

“I joined Go Green club freshman year, and when I joined it was pretty much me, the president, her boyfriend who went to a different school, and two other freshman who still are in the club,” Elkinson admits, “We kind of didn’t really do that much, we sort of just went to clean-ups and we didn’t really meet.”

Go Green Club, in Elkinsons four years as a member, has slowly grown. This allows the club to now accomplish much more than they ever could before with an increase in members and a push for club involvement in the community. One new improvement that the club is passionate about this year is recycling at HC. 

“This is our first year helping run the recycling program here at HC, and Ms.Inman has helped play a huge part in that,” Elkinson said, “but going back to my freshman year HC didn’t really do any recycling.”

This is just one of the new actions Go Green Club is passionate about. Another important project is tree week. 

“Tree week is a week-long event that goes on in Lexington and other places across the state and it is pretty much a celebration of trees,” Elkinson explained. “It has educational events, tree walks, tree plantings, arts and crafts, and I highly recommend checking out the urban forest initiatives website where they have all of the activities and information where you can learn more.” https://ufi.ca.uky.edu/treeweek

Go Green Club also plans to host an event for tree week at HC, during the week of October 8th-16th. They don’t yet have the details, however, to learn about tree week and other things that Go Green club is doing you can check their Instagram which is @HCHS.gogreenclub. 

HC’s Go Green Club’s most successful improvement however has been digitalizing the FCPS Code of Conduct. This was extremely successful and greatly helped the environment. By digitalizing the Code of Conducts across FCPS, over 5000 trees will be saved annually and will save the district over $20,000 per year. 

HC’s Go Green Club has strived to improve the well-being of not only HC but also FCPS. The club plans to continue its many initiatives to improve sustainability. Equally as important though, Go Green plans to continue to provide an opportunity for students to get involved in their community and provide a place for students to help improve the schools impact on the environment. 

“We really provide an opportunity for students to get involved in their community, and I have had people tell me that they want to do that but don’t really know how and Go Green provides that,” Elkinson said.