Castlemaine’s school climate strike students have spent an afternoon calling on local businesses to register their support for next month’s big global climate strike.
It was not financial support that the group of students from Castlemaine Secondary College were after when they hit the streets last Friday afternoon.
It was more a question of moral support ahead of the September 20 Strike 4 Climate event set for 2pm at Melbourne’s Treasury Gardens, local student Milou Albrecht explained.
“We’re going around to local businesses to ask them if they will support us, just making it known that they are supporting the school strikes and September 20,” she said.
On that date literally tens of thousands of people are expected to participate in similar demonstrations at locations across the globe.
All are calling for effective action to address the hot button issue of climate change with Castlemaine’s own local student climate strikers participating in the Melbourne event and inviting anyone else to join them.
Coming three days before the UN Climate Summit in New York City, September 20 will see simultaneous actions at locations from Melbourne to New York, from Nigeria to Karachi.
“We’ll be catching the 10.51am train and we’ll all march into the city and we’ll strike – hopefully with tens of thousands of other students and adults and children,” Milou said on Friday as the Castlemaine students prepared to approach the local enterprises.
And after about 90 minutes spent at the task, the students reported an overwhelmingly positive response with numerous businesses registering their support and agreeing to display posters.
“Some of them have taken posters and already put them up,” student Emilia Vellacott said.
“It was really amazing because I was thinking we were going to get more negative responses but actually we got so many positive ones like ‘we love what you’re doing and thank you’.
“So it was really nice to see that we do actually have support in the community.”
