CBC’s The Hour is leveraging the cachet of George Stroumboulopoulos to get Canada to commit a million acts of green.
One Million Acts of Green is The Hour’s nationwide environmental challenge. It wants Canadians to make eco-friendly acts every single day, big or small, until the nationwide tally hits one million.
It’s not about radically overhauling your life, Stroumboulopoulos told his audience last night. “It’s about making little changes every day, green changes, to make a difference.”
And with backing by Cisco Systems, it has a slick social networking site to go with it. Canadians can track their acts of green, interact with friends to encourage and challenge one another to the finish. Though apparently the challenge is more popular than even The Hour and Cisco hoped-the site was unavailable this morning.
The Challenge has obvious benefits for the CBC and Cisco, since they’ll be credited with getting Canadians to make themselves greener. If this succeeds, it would be ideal for both to run it as a yearly challenge to boost that positive image.
The hope, of course, is that once Canadians have found out how easy it is to be green, they’ll keep on doing it. Whether Canada continues to associate The Hour and Cisco with starting it all will remains to be seen.
Still, I can tell you that ten minutes after the site went live at 11 PM last night, nearly 600 acts of green had already been completed. It’s early, but it looks like the One Million Acts of Green will be acheived pretty quickly. In the end, isn’t that a campaign that benefits everyone?
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