We are delighted to share a blog written by Kesthikathevi Thayalan, a student at REAL International School who is part of a team delivering a Global Goals project for the 2019-20 Global Goals Competition.
Their project is among over 957 social action projects currently running as part of the GSL movement and we are excited to be supporting them to design and lead positive social change in their community.
It was a new, different, knowledgeable and an environmentally friendly experience.
Project Overview
The GSL Project is an essential and environmentally friendly project. It allows youngsters to learn about leadership skills earlier. It also allows youngsters to interact with the environmental issues and start giving ideas and spread awareness to solve the problems.
My group name for the GSL project is ‘Aquality’. We chose this name because our goals are ‘quality education’ and ‘Clean water and sanitation’. We chose these goals as we found out that our society is most lagging in these two. We found one women workers’ hostel that have no idea about the essential of water and the issues the world is facing about water. This has inspired us a lot to take up Goal 6 ( Clean water and sanitation).
We have a variety of plans regarding our goals. We also have successfully achieved some aims towards these goals. Firstly, we participated in an environmental campaign, where we collected plastic bottles. We collected plastic bottles to reuse it as Malaysia has a serious problem on huge amounts of plastic waste that can’t we decomposed. We also needed the bottles for our next step ,which was teaching the orphans about how to do a diy water filter. We also received many soft toys and story books from the students in our school. We requested the students in our school to give us the toys and books as we wanted to give them to the orphans. We gave books to the orphans in order to achieve the goal ‘quality education’-and toys was just a bonus for the orphans as a gift from us.
Our Journey
After fortunately finishing some of our plans, we learned lots of new things. We were even able to identify our own talents and skills. We mainly learned on how to be a good leader and activist. We also sold some toys and books that we had collected during our Open Day. During this day, we experienced being an entrepreneur, which taught us how to be patient. At first we didn’t have any customers, but after half an hour we began seeing buyers. We went to the orphanage not only to promote our project but also to help them out a bit. We got contact with the orphanage through a charity organisation. We went to the orphanage with the organisation. We helped them cut some vegetables for lunch for the orphans. The orphans were only given a specific amount of food. From this, we learnt how to share and care, and always be grateful.
Finally, by participating in an environmental campaign, we learnt how to grab people’s attention. We also had to have good communication skills which we had learned over the period of time while doing this project. On the other hand, we still had some challenges doing this project. Our biggest challenge was finding sponsors and time management. Luckily, the GSL team has given us an opportunity to discuss about this through a video call, which would give us some ideas on how to overcome our problems.
The Next Chapter
Lastly the only thing on our to-do list so far is to go to a women workers’ hostel, in order to spread awareness of the water issues that the world is tackling. Next, we would also post posters via social media to promote our project and post posters regarding reusing and reducing the usage of water. I would highly recommend young people to really take the effort and opportunity to try out projects that are similar to the GSL project. It can really help you out in various ways. It would be very useful for your knowledge about the issues around the global world and would be helpful for your future studies.
This project also helped my team members and me to boost our self-esteem. This is because we needed to make an announcement during our assembly to ask everyone to give a helping hand for our project. However we weren’t experts in this. We felt very nervous ,but to make this program a success, we took our first steps. During the Save the Earth Environmental Campaign, we also wanted other people to know more about the program so they can also support. We had to communicate with them. These helped us in self-breakthroughs.To conclude, we feel that everything must be tried before you reject because everything must start with ourselves. This is to gain experience fast and bring the world into a great change.
The 2019-20 GSL Global Goals Competition is now open and runs until June 2020. If you belong to one of the 700+ teams of students currently delivering a social action project as part of the competition we would love to hear from you and feature your blog and project photos on our website to inspire others.
