We are delighted to share a blog written by Anna Papaevaggelou, a teacher at American Farm School of Thessaloniki who supervises a team delivering a Global Goals project for the 2018-19 Global Goals Competition.
Their project is among over 620 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.
A creative brainstorming which begins to bear fruit!
Project Overview
In the AFS PeaceJam club, our focus has been to reduce food waste on campus. We are trying to collaborate with an organisation and redistribute the food that is left unconsumed in our dining hall. We have received a generous donation of containers after contacting local businesses and are now trying to determine the amount of food available for donations on a weekly basis. We also aim to compost the leftovers of the food portions not fully consumed by students each day.
Our goal is to make the campus more sustainable, inform and motivate the students to pay closer attention to environmental issues, and help organisations that are in need in our local community – all while raising awareness of their work and mission within our school community. For our team, this project means starting locally and making small changes both in infrastructure and in student knowledge of and commitment to environmental issues. We aspire to achieve this by making a series of changes in the dining hall and by launching an information campaign regarding environmental issues and waste.
Our Journey
In our effort to minimize the food waste from the school’s cafeteria, maybe the most challenging part is communication. For the composting program, we had to decide what food can and cannot be composted, how the food will be transferred to the composting bins, and more importantly, how we will get the students to participate in the program.
These questions took a long time and many conversations to be answered. We also had to get in touch with the people in charge of the school’s agriculture program, in order to learn more about our school’s composting abilities. Coordination and communication were key to making this work. Because of this we learned to communicate better as a group, and that patience is necessary.
The Next Chapter
We believe that people in our age are the future. So we should focus on raising their awareness on such topics to make our world better for everyone. If we could share a message with them, that would definitely be: “Don’t be afraid take action because your actions could improve the world—our world”.
Everyone should take in similar projects as ours—especially people in our age—because this is the time of our lives that we form ourselves and we create new habits that could stick with us all our lives. These projects are the new habits that we want to adopt.
The 2018-19 GSL Global Goals Competition is now open and runs until June 2019. 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.
