We are delighted to share a blog written by students Mnauela Gòmez, Isabella Olarte, Miguel Garces, Luciana Ramirez from The Columbus School, who are 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.
To start making a change, we must start somehow. When a community begins to recycle at home, we help preserve the environment, and get 90 people to apply compost technique in order to recycle more organic waste and reduce the amount of garbage.
Project Overview
In a neighborhood located in Medellin, Colombia, 891 pounds of organic waste is thrown per month. It consists of a 27 house unit, occupied by an average of 4-6 people where each house disposes a usual waste of 8.5 pounds of organic waste per week.
We got inspired by analyzing the data, we should start taking advantage of all the organic waste we throw away on a daily basis. The project consists of creating a composting program in a unit of houses called “Monteverdi”. All organic food collected will be recycled and used at the units vegetable plot. The most important detail of this project is that not only the creators will be developing it, all families, most of them with small children, will be involved in the project. Not only will we be educating children from an early age to recycle, we will also be helping the community environment of 90 people.
Our Journey
As the project is just beginning, our biggest obstacle so far was to convince the unit administration to agree to develop the project. Not only should we persuade the administrator of the community , we also had to convince the unit council (made up of several neighbors), and most of the neighbors to share our enthusiasm to develop this compost project.
Some of our skills acquired by participating in the Global Goals Competition are: our ability to present and explain, since we had to explain the project several times to a large group of people. Another ability we learned was to be more organized, we managed to gain an extension in our knowledge about recycling and how to teach others (including young children) the most important data about it.
Before starting the project, we were not aware of the importance of recycling and the large footprint it can make on the planet. Although we are only developing the project in a community of only 27 houses, we have in mind that “a change” must begin in some way.
The Next Chapter
We would totally recommend other adolescents to apply this technique at home with their families since it has a lot of advantages, is easy to do and is eco friendly for example it promotes land-use, lowers pollution risk, reduces land disease, reduces methane emissions from landfills lowers the carbon footprint, improves livestock and it is cheap and easy to implement. What inspired us to do this project was to create pure and clean compost, and to have a sustainable environment full of plants and nature and preserve the nature that surrounds us in our daily life.
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.
