Green Team America is the brainchild of a dedicated high school science teacher in Southern California and a retired advertising executive in Southern Texas. This odd couple came together in 2007 when the teacher contacted the retiree, Gary Dunham, to arrange a series of global warming classroom presentations for her entire school district.
Dunham and a dozen other Al Gore trained presenters gathered in San Diego and in two days spread their “inconvenient” climate change message to over 15,000 enthusiastic high school students and associated faculty. Dunham later noted that the two day combined audiences represented many times the average attendance the presenters usually encountered.
He also realized that the teens were a direct link to more households and uninvolved parents than the presenters could ever reach using their conventional methods. In a recent newspaper article Dunham explained that “Reaching the students and their families with a message is only half the problem facing the entire spectrum of environmental service organizations. Once informed of the crises facing Planet Earth, Americans have to somehow begin to make meaningful strides in the struggle to arrest and reverse the effects of man-made climate alteration. We will need an army of energetic young people who already understand the problems and are ready to solve them because, in their own words, it’s our world too”.
There are almost 30,000 high schools across America and most of them already have an environmental club and a dedicated faculty adviser. Membership totals vary, but it is estimated that there are 2-3 million students involved. Green Team America was created to unite these students in a green crusade that can achieve dramatic and measurable results.
Green Team America is a not-for-profit 501(c)3 organization
