For the month of March, in honor of Women’s History Month, I am dedicating my weekly blog posts to the outstanding organizations, resources, and inspiring stories about women in STEM. You can view my posts from this year and past years by searching on the tag “Women’s History Month”.

Help us show .@EPA some love, write a postcard with your stories for our new #OurEPA campaign @Our_EPA https://t.co/k3bzwsvbwq

— #OurEPA (@Our_EPA) March 14, 2017

In this blog post, I would be “preaching to the choir” if I spent time talking about the importance of the EPA, about its mission to protect human health and the environment, and what the impacts to Planet Earth would be if the proposed 31% budget cut was approved. I spent some time earlier this semester sharing with students the history of the EPA and photos from the Documarica Project – as the majority of my students are from the Philadelphia area, they were quite surprised at how different the environment of Philly looked back in the 70s.

Yes, it is important to share with students the role our government scientists and agencies play in researching and protecting Earth systems – but is just sharing information about why [insert agency or science discipline here] matters? The organization 500 Women Scientists (actually 17,000 women from more than 100 countries) announced on March 14 that their #TakeActionTuesday campaign would be to show support for the EPA with postcards.

Now more than ever, EPA cannot move backwards. The EPA must remain a leader in the American environmental movement, and continue and build upon their critical work cleaning up the environment, ensuring environmental justice, and protecting human health. — #OurEPA from 500 Women Scientists

Anyone and everyone is encouraged to write a postcard to their regional EPA office (addresses available here) to show support for their work (some people are even sending cookies along with their messages!). People are also encouraged to send a second postcard to their representative to tell him/her that you support the EPA, and they should, too. If you are looking for some unique postcard templates to download and print off on cardstock, the organization Postcards from the People have created some beautiful designs available at: http://www.postcardsfromthepeople.com/.

I’m already hearing about K-12 teachers that are having students in their classrooms write postcards. Next week, my campus library and I are coordinating a four-hour campus-wide postcard writing party. Please note that even one postcard can help make a difference – please consider writing a postcard and sending it off today! (500 Women Scientists would like the postcards mailed off by April 1st)

Learn more about this advocacy effort at the #OurEPA website – and don’t forget to take a photo and post to Twitter with #OurEPA to @Our_EPA.