Please give the gift of creative environmental education to more underserved New York City youth! Your year-end donation is a critical for us to continue innovating, teaching, and sharing our creative environmental STEM curriculum.

LITTER MONSTERS are everywhere, but you can take immediate action to keep plastic street litter out of our oceans and out of marine wildlife. Refuse single-use plastics by bringing your own cup, bag, straw and containers for to-go food! Changing your behavior is not so hard when you can grasp the consequebces of each peice of plastic packaging you use every day, even when you think you are disposing of it properly.

Cafeteria Culture co-created LITTER MONSTERS, a stop motion animation/live action hyrbid documentary video, with PS/MS 34M 5th graders a part of our YOUTH MEDIA forTRASH FREE WATERS program.* Students were alarmed to learn about our marine litter plight. They scripted this story from thier unique urban youth POV to show their community and the world how seemingly harmless plastic street litter gets into our waterways, threatens our oceans, harms marine wildlife and returns to us in our seafood dinner. 

Did you know, when it rains in New York City and over 700 other US municipalities, large amounts of water can cause combined sewer systems to overflow? This allows street litter and raw sewage to flow directly out to our local waterways, making its way to the ocean and eventually to the bellies of marine wildlife. Get inspired to take action to reduce your to-go plastic use.

Together with our students, we are testing out and sharing youth-designed, community-based solutions to reduce local polluting plastic litter that becomes a toxic global threat to our oceans and wildflife.

* THANK YOU to all of our individual donors and funders who made our Youth ARTS+Media for TRASH FREE WATERS School Program 2015-16 and this video possible:

• The US Environmental Protection Agency, Region 2, Sustainable Materials Management, CASD
• NYC Councilwoman Rosie Mendez
• UL Innovative Education Award 2015
• Fund for the City of New York