Wainfleet Girls Take Action!

Wainfleet Mayor, April Jeffs and Leanna Villella join the girls on their mission to clean the feeder canal

Mikayla Balicki, Carlee Thornton and Zivi Schaffer formed the group The Earth Savers Feeder Clean Up

Sometimes a simple initiative can grow into a major event. This is what three grade four William E Brown Public School students discovered when a little walk they went on along the Wainfleet Feeder Canal uncovered a massive pile of garbage. And they didn’t just keep walking. They decided to stop and do something about it.

“We were all getting together for the weekend and we were walking on the feeder and I found a coffee cup,” explains Mikyla Balicki, 10. “We decided we should start collecting all the litter that we see to make the environment clean and we did it for about an hour or two and then the next day we got together again."
Balicki and her friends Carlee Thornton and Zivi Schaffer took their cleaning efforts a step further and formed the group the Earth Savers Feeder Clean Up.
"People shouldn’t treat our earth like it’s just garbage or a junk yard,” says Thornton, 10. “We should look after it.”

They planned an after school clean up event at the feeder on April 15 and were surprised by the turnout.

“(There are)way more people than I expected,” says Schaffer. “I think we’ll do it regularly.”

Wainfleet Mayor, April Jeffs, showed up to help and said she thought the girls were setting a “great example” for other youths and she wanted to be involved.
"I was really inspired by the girls wanting to do this and really impressed that they would take this initiative,” Jeffs says. “So I thought I had a couple of hours today to come out and help them.”

Jeffs says the girls are “really ambitious to do this for the community.”

“It’s a real community initiative and everybody knows, I think from my campaign, that I really like the feeder and I want to see something done with it…The feeder is very important in Wainfleet and it doesn’t look good when there’s all this garbage laying around.”

Jeffs also believes it is important to encourage ideas such as this from young people.

“If you show that you support them then it motivates them to keep interested in doing good things like this. And then they’ll continue in the future.”

Conservative Party candidate, Leanna Villella was also at the clean up event. She had received an email from Thornton’s mother asking if she would be interested in meeting the kids, but Villella wanted to do more.

“I said, ‘can I come by and help’. And they were shocked I think,” says Villella. “As soon as I hear anything about children…I’m here.”

Villella says the community has a responsibility to set an example for the children.
"As a community I think we need to teach our kids to protect the environment, to keep things clean, to take pride in their environment; those things are important, and we lead by example. For me, that’s why I’m here.”

Balicki has some advice to other kids wanting to do something special this Earth Day.
"Picking up every single piece of garbage you see counts,” she says. “That’s sort of our motto….think before you do that (litter) because that just makes our environment a whole junk yard.”