We are delighted to share a blog written by student Rana, from Isikkent Middle School, delivering a Global Goals project for the 2020-21 GSL 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.
We took a journey that has changed our lifestyle, and we enjoy every moment of it.
Project Summary
‘‘I always wondered why somebody didn’t do something about that, then I realized I was somebody.’’ That is the quote that we had in mind when we started our project.
With this project, our main goal and perspective is to provide useful suggestions, alarming quotes and crucial information provided by experts while educating others and creating awareness along the way. We knew that with Covid-19, taking part in an active and interactive project would’ve been a challenge, so we had to continue our studies and project at home. The need that we identified in our local community was spreading the knowledge that we gained and continue to gain about the global goals, particularly the goals that our project focuses on through our Instagram page.
Since social media has been a key part of our lives, especially during quarantine, we wanted to make it to our advantage and base our project on Instagram. With this in mind, we started our compost journey. Choosing our first area of interest wasn’t easy, however we decided that it was best to start off with a project that contributed to the environment and helped our followers stay active and occupied while at home. In order to achieve this, we created our Instagram account.
Our Journey
Our journey started off with 5 individuals with very different identities and ages, who all came together to support a common goal. With that goal in mind, we became a team. Our first challenge was arranging our weekly meeting times due to our very different and busy schedules. We knew that we would be facing many more challenges like this along the way, though we were all determined to find innovative and efficient solutions for each and every one.
Before we started sharing our voices to our followers, we wanted to see how we could improve ourselves to be better at handling social media, thus how to create professional videos, animations, posts edits etc. To achieve this, we took several classes each conducted by professionals and therefore, expanded our knowledge on these topics. We knew that in order to spread useful and accurate knowledge, we needed to have a good foundation first.
Our first steps on spreading awareness were not on our social media account, but by organizing presentations, both to all four grade levels (grades 5 to 8) in our school and to primary grade students at a school just outside of our city, who were eager to learn about our compost journey. In fact, we can say that one of our biggest challenges was preparing for these presentations. Time constrictions, not being able to find the right and accurate materials, not enough public speaking experience were some of the main challenges that we faced when managing these presentations. Though it is safe to say that we all got better with each presentation, and at the end which was the fourth presentation- we accomplished our best one. Afterwards, we continued on with our Instagram page and moved forward from there. We recorded every step along the way and documented them on our page. @iek_sosyal_etki_yaratanlar
We are still learning and growing as time goes on, as difficulties, challenges and hardships occur, we try to make the best out of them and learn from our past experiences. It is quite clear that we still have a long way to go in order to achieve our ultimate goal, however the experience and knowledge that we obtain throughout this journey is much more beneficial than just aiming to reach our goal.
Our Next Chapter
We believe that our next chapter holds many new opportunities for us, either with new faces or the same team. Our next step in the near future is to demonstrate kindergarten students how to make their own compost buckets with basic materials and train them on how to make compost for recycling food waste into good use. In the meantime, the waste oil project will follow composting, so it will increase sustainability at home. Then, we will be exploring our next topics and goals, which we have determined on by conducting a survey to the students in our school about Covid-19’s effects and psychological factors and what they want us to help the most, to further spread out our voice. Since we want to give our followers a wide range of opportunities, thus we think that focusing on more than one topic would be better for us as a team.
Currently, we have partnered up with the Aegean Forest Foundation to donate saplings to forests all over our Aegean coasts with our followers who take action and participate in our project. We plan on further expanding our partnership as new people take part in our project and our impact grows.
The 2020-21 GSL Global Goals Competition is now open and runs until June 2021. If you belong to one of the 500+ 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.
