Events We Love: Greening The Sphere
In an age when sustainability and Climate Change are household concerns, events like Greening The Sphere’s Sustainability Festival are more important than ever.
Greening The Sphere is a one-day festival hosted by the eponymous nonprofit that will take place June 17th, 2017 from 11 AM until 5 PM at Hope & Main in Warren, Rhode Island.
With a long history of practicing healing arts (and graphic design!), Founder Shari Bitsis says the idea for the Festival came about in a moment of kismet after years of teaching a regular class called “Group Manifestation for You and the Earth”– a class that had been meeting for about five years with evolving goals. “We would write out scripts and then I would do a group meditation where we would all visualize for each other. Because there’s a lot of evidence to support the idea that when you use your thoughts and your feelings, and you direct them in a certain way– which is called intention— it heals things.”
Eventually, Bitsis and her cohort began targeting their energies towards healing the Earth– a practice born from their desire to heal the system that supports all humans, animals, and living beings.
“It’s not exactly prayer, because prayer sometimes comes from a place of lack,” Bitsis says of the process that developed in her class. “Prayer sometimes comes from fear, and if prayer comes from fear, it doesn’t really work,” she notes. “If prayer comes from hope, however– and believing that you can create something that makes a difference in the world– then it actually makes a difference.”
With these intentions in mind, Bitsis took the practice a step further, founding her 501(c)3 nonprofit, Greening The Sphere, as a way to inspire people into action at a time when it couldn’t be more important. Naturally, students and education became a key component of this mission. The idea to host a sustainability festival, which serves as an opportunity for kids to flush out their creative ideas in a way that betters their community, was a logical next step.
“We’re working with the local high school in the East Bay, the Bristol Warren School, which is Mt. Hope, to provide internships,” says Bitsis, emphasizing the wide range of skills the festival can help students employ. “The kids can learn event planning, they can learn about sustainability, and this year has been really interesting,” she reflects on this year’s festival. “The kids have great ideas… We’re even making greenhouse out of water bottles!”
This year’s Greening The Sphere Festival will host everything from games, food, and info sessions to workshops on environmental topics as wide-ranging as beekeeping and composting. (“The Compost Plant [Rhode Island’s first commercial food scrap collection service,] will be doing a talk on the process of industrialized composting rather than personal composting,” Bitsis notes. “It’s more of a ‘How can we take this to the next level?’ kind of thing.”)
Other impressive programming includes a talk on “Wild Invasive Plants as Food”, a “Dyeing to Wear It” workshop on natural clothing dye, Marvelous Marvin performing his science-focused Brain Circus, numerous student displays, face painting, a Greening The Sphere scavenger hunt, live music, raffle baskets, local food trucks, and much, much more. All food will be composted, and even the program will be printed on recycled paper using natural dye. “Our goal is to show people the steps–even the small steps!– that they can take to improve our world,” says Bitsis. “Even the small gestures can make a huge difference.”
For more information about Greening The Sphere Festival, follow @greeningthesphere on Instagram, check out the Greening The Sphere Facebook Page, or check in with @greenthesphere on Twitter (note it’s “green”, not “greening”).
We hope to see you at this beautiful event!
