Our Passion!
Samantha and I have been friends since elementary school and were drawn together by a common interest of playing soccer. We’ve always continued our friendship through the years, even when we were provinces apart. The level of communication drifted as new chapters in our lives began. Sam always held a special place in my heart throughout our friendship, starting from when we first met. She was someone who helped me through rough times, never offered judgment and someone I could just be real with. Everything from riding our bikes together, (and not telling our parents we weren’t wearing our helmets), to laying in the sunshine, bleaching our hair with a Sunlight bar. After passing through bigger milestones in our lives, marriage and children, creating busy, chaotic lives, we found our friendship not drifting apart like many do, we actually discovered more common interests and found support in each other again. The desire to make healthier choices for our family, caring for the earth and ultimately, sharing goals with, simply being green moms. We started by meeting over coffee with babies on our hips to discussing our thoughts and aspirations. We loved the idea of creating a community of like-minded moms and so, launched a Facebook group. We started with adding all our friends and family, hoping they would lend their support…even if it was just a ‘thumbs up’ or a ‘like’. We quickly learned, you cannot force people to share the same passion for the environment. We happily watched our numbers grow on our group, and climb to 518 and counting. We found members who were equally as excited about a green product as we were. We found support and valued opinions we never examined before. It was a breathe of green, fresh air!
Next came the support of some local green ‘mompreneurs’, and held our first event in my home, where we invited 7 various green vendors, who shared their products with a small audience. We were happy and proud of our efforts, but disappointed we didn’t reach more people. Sam and I decided we would hold a second event and this time it would be bigger and better. We doubled our vendors and doubled our visitors. Again, we were happy with our initiatives, yet still felt disappointed we couldn’t have reached more than we did. Which led us to our current goals and expectations. What are our next steps? How can we continue to grow and share our environmental passion? How can we support other like-minded moms and establish a community? From here, we decided we would launch a crazy, scary but exciting, year-long journey on committing to buy nothing new for a year! We invite you to follow us in our challenges and rewards we find along the way. Take a look at our “NOTHING NEW” section and Facebook page;
@simplygreenmumsNOTHINGNEW