Your votes are in! Please join us in giving a hearty round of applause to the winners of the Be the Change! Share the Story! school video contest. The efforts all three of our finalists put into turning out their supporters were so phenomenal it nearly crashed our server. Most importantly, these three schools did an outstanding job of Being the Change they want to see in the world, and Sharing their Stories.

All three schools are winners (really!) and will all win prizes. The focus of this message, however, is not the prizes, but the stories of these amazing students. Please take moment to watch their videos (if you haven't yet) and read about what they did to mobilize their communities around the inspiring projects they documented.

First Place: McTavish Green Team
(visit team page to watch videos)

The Grand Prize goes to the Green Team at McTavish Elementary School in Saanich, British Columbia, just outside Victoria. These youngsters created a comprehensive waste reduction program for their school that included composting food waste and recycling all manner of materials that are not normally taken by recycling programs. Not only did they cut the schools waste by 80%, they took their program out into the community, educating city leaders, local businesses and consumers about the importance of recycling. They even set up bins and organized special collection days at City Hall and a local grocery store. Led by teacher (aka "Green Queen") Maria St. Amand, the team's efforts got so much media attention, including national TV, they've been receiving calls from across Canada asking for advice on starting similar programs.

On Tuesday afternoon, just after the voting closed, the McTavish student body held a special assembly to watch all three teams' videos. Afterwards, the school's principal posted a note congratulating all the winners. "You have all proved that small groups of people can accomplish great things and bring about positive changes for our environmen," he wrote. "It is exciting to see our young people empowered and leading us in the right direction!"

Second Place: LCC Social Justice
(visit team page to watch videos )

The most original and entertaining video (in our humble opinion) was the first entry from our First Runner-Up, the Social Justice class at La Costa Canyon High School, in Carlsbad, California. "Bottled Water Break-Up" tells the story of a teenage girl dumping her old flame, a little single-use plastic water bottle, for her new love, a reusable metal container. The informative video is packed with facts -- for example, 38 billion plastic water bottles are thrown away every year in the US alone, and it takes 700 years for them to start breaking down in a landfill -- all cleverly set to the Bright Eyes song "True Blue." LCC's follow-up video reports on the real-world impact the team's campaign had -- hundreds of students, teachers, and community members who have now "broken up" with bottled water -- and ends with a whimsical note, "Relationships should be meaningful, not just convenient."

The LCC team's outreach efforts were also phenomenal, garnering tons of local media coverage in the San Diego area (special kudos to the grassroots organizing work of team leader Christopher Greenslate). QuantumShift TV has even received inquiries from people who want to show "Bottled Water Break-Up" from as far away as Hawaii.

Third Place: Global Ambassadors
(visit team page to watch videos)

The Global Ambassadors team at Eastview Middle School in White Plains, New York, is nothing short of a powerhouse. To fulfill their mission of promoting the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals, the club takes kids to visit the UN headquarters in New York City and organizes a dizzying array of programs throughout the year, including their own kid-produced TV show called "It's True News," which you can watch here. The Global Ambassadors' first video was a broad introduction to the club. The second video focused on just one of their projects, an annual event called "Fashion for a Cause" which raised funds to support clean water projects in Uganda.

Frank Scura, executive director of our major contest sponsor, the Action Sports Environmental Coalition, commented on the power of these youth-made videos: "This is a wake up call for all adults to pay attention to. This generation will be the first since the natives that cared for this land before it was industrialized to fully grasp the ideal that we do not own the world, we are merely inhabitants of it and caregiving it's precious resources for future generations -- the generation that is creating this media and the generations that will inherit it from them. On behalf of ASEC I would like to say that we are honored to be a part of this history-making interaction. Viva La Youth, Viva La Resolution!"

All of us here at QuantumShift, as well as our contest sponsors, are honored to have been even a tiny part of motivating these teams to take such important actions in their communities and share their stories through the magic of online video. Their efforts to make this world a better place are like drops in a pond that will keep rippling out and inspiring others to Be the Change and Share their Stories.

Congratulations,

The QuantumShift Team