We are delighted to share a blog written by student Talya Bener from Hisar School, 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.
A splendid green venture of walking towards zero waste and establishing a greener,cleaner and sustainable community.
Project Overview
Our aim is to add perspective to the lives of less fortunate children who do not have access to many educational resources. In Turkey, public schools, unfortunately, do not have as many opportunities as private schools. Our belief is that every child should have the opportunity to learn arts and technology and be handed the opportunities to succeed in a constantly evolving world. Visual arts and music are essential for someone to express themselves; it additionally is a creative outlet. Technology, on the other hand, is what shapes the future. We will fulfill our goal by making arts, music and technology-based workshops. We hope to extend their visions by making them become aware of the areas that they can pursue by introducing them to new subjects. In addition, we aspire to open arts, music and technology departments in their schools to give the children a permanent place to work on their interests.
Our Journey
At the beginning of our research and planning process, we gathered as a group of four people in the entrepreneurship club in our school. Firstly, we determined our main goal which is: Quality Education (SDG#4) and also we will work on the goal “Sustainable Cities and Countries” in order to raise their awareness on sustainability and our ecosystem because lack of knowledge of the environmental issues that our world is facing today is a significant issue in rural areas of Turkey and many other countries. After we determined our main goal, we started brainstorming ideas and designed our pathway to assist the acknowledgment of these crucial areas by children. Lastly, we filled out the business model canvas and almost finalized our plan. We are planning to spread our project through social media and share our process step by step. In this period, we have managed to construct a satisfactory plan which we believe will have an efficient role in fulfilling our aim. We have determined a few workshop ideas and started to plan those with detail. In addition, we developed our teamwork skills by communicating frequently and supporting each other. Throughout our steps, we have faced a couple of challenges. To be able to find out how we can reach out to schools in rural areas was pretty challenging. To fix this problem, we did research and found someone who has been working with rural schools her whole life. Another problem we had, in the beginning, was our concerns about finding money to fund the schools and the children. We were able to overcome this problem by adding a new system to our project: we planned to sell the pots we make which will make us gain money.
The Next Chapter
First of all, as we mentioned before, we will get in contact with a science teacher who dedicated her life to supporting rural schoolchildren by increasing the quality of their education and prevent them from losing opportunities in life. After that, we will design our workshops with all the details and research where to get equipment and search for sponsorships and discounts to lower our expenditure on this project. It is obvious that education is one of the most critical factors which determines a person’s future. Today’s students will be our future leaders. Therefore, more young people should participate in similar projects because supporting rural school’s education will have an enormously positive effect in their, their country’s and the world’s future. Everyone can start by donating to appropriate organizations working on the subject of education and participating or even creating organizations to support education.
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.
