We are delighted to share a blog written by Victoria Vieira, a student atBritish School Jakarta who is part of 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.
This experience is extremely heartwarming, makes you appreciate the people around you and makes you thankful to be here.
Project Overview
In our CAS project, we aim to raise money to help Saraswati Learning Centre build a cafe which will serve as a workplace for the special needs young adults so they can develop collaboration skills as well developing skills within a work environment.
Through this project, we want to be able to raise awareness to having young adults with special needs working in public places as well as being treated equally. When one of our group members went to visit the school for first time, she had instant connection with one of the kids and observed that they can do anything if taught repeatedly and with plenty of patience.
Recently, she visited the Centre and one of the children recognized her and waved, which was very heartwarming. We are currently selling bracelets along with notebooks that were all made by the young adults. We always make time to go visit the centre to engage with them, as well as make bracelets with them.
Our Journey
As a group, we have developed multiple skills including patience while helping the young adults make bracelets, as we have to be considerate and understand their condition. We have also developed our collaborative skills as we will be working on this project along with each other for the next two years, as well as additional volunteers.
We have learnt that we have to be more organized with the orders for the bracelets by updating the order sheet more frequently. Our biggest challenge would be getting customers attention because bracelets are becoming less popular and not many people wear it. We plan on overcoming this challenge by selling different products such as shirts and notebooks.
The Next Chapter
I would recommend for teens to do projects like this that involve a community that doesn’t have as much awareness so we could have an equal society. People that are our age should explore their community and see if there are people in need meaning they don’t have enough awareness about them.
Doing projects like these will benefit the people you’re helping since they’re a small community and don’t have much awareness which means that your input will make a big difference in their lives.
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.
