Not this guy. Yet.

This week, on great news from BTB:

• Ari’s has a little chat with John Stewart
• BTB will serve as a model for 20+ other schools
• The BDH will be writing a feature on BTB
• A speech is coming together for the next BUCC meeting
• A movie will be screened with lots of love
• The gears keep churning and the bottles keep dropping.

Get the rest of your yummy BTB news after the jump

Good morning, Beyond the Bottle!

It has been too, too long since we last met and got updates, so I wanted to send out an e-mail with a few logistics and announcements.

At our last meeting, we divided up certain task; how are these coming along? I know that:

• Chrissie and Priya have drafted a survey for us to hand out, which is great;
• Talia has pulled some strings at the BDH and is getting a feature written about us!
• Madeleine has been working on getting our movie screening up and running;
• and I found out from the SAO that we can get approval to do our bottle-tower-building competition on the Main Green and leave it up for a few days!

SO, follow up questions:
Madeleine, how is planning for the movie going? What’s our final day? Have we booked the room with Scheduling/Media?
Priya/Madeleine/other Student Outreach team members: How is contacting professors to be on a movie panel going? Anyone make any connections?
Administration/BUDS teams: how is everything going? I don’t have specific tasks written down for individual people from our last meeting, but can someone from each give an update on what you guys have been working on? I know we decided to shoot for the next BUCC meeting to give a presentation, which is in a month (Nov. 17 – Thanks Talia); are we on the schedule? BUDS team, I know you’ve been somewhat frustrated in your efforts to reach out to our contacts there, but have we gotten anywhere?

Finally, some exciting news!
On Monday I had a lengthy phone call with John Stewart (not Jon Stewart, but almost as exciting), an organizer for Corporate Accountability International’s Think Outside the Bottle campaign, which is a national campus anti-bottled water campaign. He and I chatted for a long time about where we’re going and where we’ve been. He was very impressed with what we’ve accomplished in a short period of time – the TOTB campaign plan that they’ve developed has several phases, and he said that we have already nailed phase one on our own! In fact, he wants a BtB representative to speak about our efforts to a group of 20+ other schools that are trying to do the same thing on a conference call he’s planning for next week. He recommends that, as we prepare for the BUCC presentation, we should start building a coalition with other campus groups and with the student body. In other words, we should start gathering pledges in support of our cause from students at our events, and reaching out to other groups asking them to pledge to not use bottled water. (He has a nice-looking pledge sheet that we can co-brand with both BtB and TOTB’s logos.)
John also told me about a nationwide week of action against Coke, demanding that they label Dasani with a clear statement that it comes from municipal sources, as both Pepsi and Nestlé have already agreed to do for their respective Aquafina and PureLife brands. CAI/TOTB are asking campuses to have tabling events where we ask students to call the CEO of Coke – and then we can get them to sign a pledge! If you would be interested in helping out with tabling for this in JWW next week, let me know! Finally, we’re invited to participate in a webinar about phasing bottled water off campus on Thursday the 29th. We’ll talk about all this and more at our meeting this Sunday!

So anyway, clearly we have a lot to look forward to. Our next meeting should be a busy one, with a lot of exciting planning and organizing, so hopefully I’ll see you all there! Bring your calendars so we can hammer out final dates for our events.

Thanks for reading! Apologies for the length.

Can’t wait to see your plastic-bottle-free faces again soon!

Beyondly,
Ari

P.S. John said that he thinks we can get bottled water off campus by the end of this year, and I agree! YES WE CAN!

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