We are delighted to share a blog written by student Paula Mingo from Sek- El Castillo, 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.
An excellent, self-growth and enriching experience
Project Overview
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
― Margaret Mead
Green Castle project started from a group of students that wanted to make a change. The roots of this project started to grow in summer of 2019, when more and more scientists confirmed that we were closer to climate change being irreversible. So, I was thinking one day, on possible solutions, on what I could do to raise awareness and where. After a while, I decided that perhaps our school community would be the best place to start because as Nelson Mandela said, “Education is the most powerful tool to change the world”. Then, I decided to make a group of committed citizens and if it not were for their trust on my idea, I would not even had the opportunity to write in this blog with great excitement, so I would like to thank them. Green Castle, vision is to create a greener school and our mission is to raise awareness in the school community about climate change and then more specifically address each of our chosen development goals, such as; clean water and sanitation, affordable and clean energy, responsible consumption and production and climate action.
Our Journey
Green Castle team has gone through a journey full of experience and self-growth. It has developed numerous skills, such as organizing skills, analytical skills, reflecting skills, critical thinking skills and last but not the least team working skills. I have learnt about myself that I really can make a group to work towards an objective, when at the beginning I did not trust myself that much. I have learnt as well, how to organize all the events, keep an organized agenda to fulfill all my tasks and combine it with school.
Surprisingly, I have been able to use my marketing knowledge applied to a real-life situation as we did a market research to target with our campaign the school community. The biggest challenge that I see is to keep everyone in the group motivated as next year is our last year in school, so we are going to have a lot of work and perhaps some of them won’t work with the same amount of intensity, as before. To overcome this, I will organize as much creative and not as time consuming activities as before, for instance instead of doing investigation about our topic to give relevant data to our community, we will focus more in activities(that are in progress) such as a recycling art competition.
The Next Chapter
Finally, I personally feel that Green Castle has a future because since we appeared in school, they have taken this issue more seriously. For instance, from now on, in my school there is going to be a Green Day, in which there would be a veggie menu and students can bring their own clothes, except for jeans as they are highly pollutant. This idea of the Green day was created by us and I am proud that our ideas have been implemented in school. Green Castle would like to go one step further, such as the installment of renewable energies in our school.
As well, Green Castle it is certain that would still be sowing the seeds of “ the green spirit “ in our school community as if we start making a change in school, then that change would be spread at a major scale. I would recommend this competition to anyone that wants to make a change because you gain a lot of experience which goes much further than including it in your curriculum. In fact, you become a better person and you start having a wider perspective of the world, which makes this experience even more valuable.
I can only say thank you for such a magnificent and enriching experience!
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.