HAMPDEN – Get Green is the theme for the George B. Weatherbee Elementary School’s Green Team, which recently received a $500 grant from the Joe Hill Charitable Trust to expand the Green Team concept in schools statewide. The team will host an Environmental Film and Fun Night on June 1.

“We’ll be using the grant money to do three things,” explained Green Team leader Dustin Ramsay, a fifth-grader at Weatherbee School. “We’ll be creating toolkits so that kids and their teachers can start their own Green Teams, setting up a Web site to connect future Green Teams and hosting an annual meeting for them next year.”

The Green Team was one of three organizations at the 2007 Hope Festival, held in April in Orono, to receive a grant from the Joe Hill Charitable Trust. The trust, which is managed by the Maine Community Foundation, was set up to “keep wealth created by Mainers in Maine, and distribute wealth more equitably within Maine.” This year’s applicants were asked to specify how their activities might address the issue of global warming.

The team’s wrap-up project for the year is the Environmental Film and Fun Night 6:30-8 p.m. Friday, June 1, at the Weatherbee School.

The free event will feature entertaining, family-friendly films on environmental topics, door prizes, hybrid car displays, green cleaning products, educational information, organic Starbucks coffees and other refreshments. Donations from the event will go toward the Green Team’s outreach efforts and its Rainforest Adoption Project.

The goals of the Weatherbee Green Team, formed this spring by third-, fourth- and fifth-graders, are “to learn more about and raise awareness of environmental issues among students, teachers and in the wider community; to lead and organize projects that will make positive environmental changes locally and globally; and to have fun making a difference.”

To further their goals this year, the team started an Energy Patrol Program at Weatherbee to promote wise electricity use. Team members also participated in environmental action activities in Bangor, Augusta and Orono, held litter patrols and toured Bangor’s recycling facility. The team is selling energy-saving, compact fluorescent light bulbs to raise money for outreach and education.

For more information on the Green Team or the Environmental Film and Fun Night, call 862-5623 or e-mail greenteammaine@aol.com.