For the past few months we have been working in psychology to plan an event that would take place sometime during Mental Health Month in May. My team and I chose to focus on the demographic of middle schoolers and decided we wanted to plan an event regarding stress and anxiety and coping with that transitioning into high school. It was a strenuous process organizing the event entirely on our own since we needed to coordinate with leaders at River Middle School, find a licensed therapist to talk about stress & anxiety and coping mechanisms, and prep 3 high school students from different grades in our high school to take part in a panel. It took a lot of work trying to find a therapist to come in and help us with our project since everyone happened to be busy or didn’t respond to our emails. However, after reaching out to Jeni Olsen from Teens Connect in Napa, she was able to help us find a teen therapist who assisted us with our event. There was a lot of going back and forth with the teacher at River who was coordinating the event at River’s library but thankfully we got it all set up and it worked out! It was definitely a learning experience dealing with 120 8th graders ALL at the same time and trying to keep them quiet but I think that they all gained something out of it and it turned out alright.
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For the past year I have been heavily involved with a newly formed council in Napa: The Napa Youth Council. The Napa Youth Council is a group of youth from high schools across Napa working with Napa Public Health and Services to decrease the access and use of tobacco amongst the youth of Napa. We have worked on various projects throughout the year but our largest project took place today. We presented at a City Council meeting regarding updating our City’s Tobacco Control Grades of 2019. Each year the American Lung Association gives each county their tobacco control grades and Napa received an overall F. To raise our Tobacco Control Grades of 2019, the council created a 3 step process which we presented about to City Council.
We received a lot of support from Friday Night Live Chapters all across Napa and had a whole room of supporters with us this evening! An update on my Guardians of the Sea project in Environmental Science which just came to an end! To recap, my group and I decided to tackle two lesser-known pollutions: light and noise pollution which I discussed in one of my recent blog posts (https://hibahshafi.weebly.com/blog/guardians-of-the-sea).
After deciding we were going to focus on light and noise pollution and completing research, we developed our needs statement: “Napa’s riverfront businesses need to minimize the harmful impact they hold over the Napa River due to noise and light pollution because of it’s detrimental impact on marine life as well as humans.” After developing our needs statement we got to work and began researching the local impact of sound and light pollution but were unable to find anything on google so we ended up reaching out to several different local organizations all over Napa. Several of the organizations got back to us and provided us with some ideas, the most helpful being looking into Environmental Impact Reports of Businesses, but that was about it. The reason behind this was that there has not been any research into the effects humans and businesses in Napa have on the amount of sound and light pollution that there is in Napa. Knowing this information, we set out to do our own research. We walked around all over downtown Napa and recorded decibel levels close to the riverfront and found that the average reading we were getting was around 70 dB which is very high and at some places, we found that the reading was over 75 dB which can impair the hearing of marine life. We also walked around to different businesses and conducted a survey asking a few basic questions about the number of lights they used, where they were located, whether or not their lights were energy efficient, and asked them about the number of events they held with large volume levels per year. After weighing the different ideas we had: going dark in downtown after 10 for a week, speaking to city council about updating the questions on Environmental Impact Reports, and finding a solution, we decided to focus on awareness. Each person can contribute greatly to the amount of noise and light pollution generated and we wanted to educate people about what the problem was and how they could help. We decided Earth Day was the perfect platform for us to raise awareness about this lesser-known issue and got a booth where we had an interactive bingo, posters were people could write in how they could lessen the amount of noise and light pollution they generated, and an informative trifold. It was a huge success and a super fun project! |
AuthorHibah Shafi is a Senior at New Technology High School. Archives
May 2019
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