Snippets from Session 7 – UNLESS
🌏🌏The theme for Session 7 in “Unless-Nature & Sustainability Education” series was “Taking Action for the Environment”. We had two guest speakers who joined us to share their journey and experiences in taking small steps for the environment.
♻♻ Falguni Maradia is a sustainability practitioner. She shared her life journey starting from the values she learnt from a big joint family that she was born into and how the values she learnt earlier in life inspired her to take actions that are pro-nature and pro-environment. Falguni ben shared how she sorts each kind of waste in her house and then ensures that it reaches right place for recycling. She also makes compost at her home and therefore ensures that wet waste, responsible for methane emissions, is utilized to make natural compost for her garden. She also makes “treasure from trash” and showed examples of how she has used old sarees to create collages. She shared multiple other examples of how participants can work towards saving environment through small doable actions.
🧹🧹Our second speaker was Ritesh Gohil. He is part of the core team at Paper Ball Educational Innovation and has initiated clean-up drives near Mahisagar river at the Sindhrot check-dam. Ritesh shared how this clean-up drive came about and the intention of the clean-up drives as a tool to raise awareness and action while also connecting with nature.
Children were then asked to join a short mock-up clean-up drive to simulate the regular clean-up drives, Children joined it enthusiastically as the volunteers lined up to form a safety perimeter for the participants. Children later shared that some of them felt bad about so much plastic and waste materials being thrown about.
We believe that somehow it must have the raised compassion for the sanitary workers as some of the participants told that they would segregate their waste to ensure that glass or sharp objects are put separately so that the sanitary workers do not get injured.
There is very little time that these children spend with us on these Sundays but we are glad to have raised the awareness by some miniscule percentage.
Later, as we are coming to the end of our series – December 8th is the certification day – we gave two final assignments to the participants.
One was “Five Things that I would Do for the Planet” which is a long-term commitment to the planet.
The other is a “14-Day Sustainability Challenge” in which participants do something positive for the nature and environment for each day of the next 14 days and document it. Each act can be small or large, it does not matter. What matters is the awareness of doing small actions each day – like switching off lights/fans when not in use; using AC for lesser time; using bicycle/walking instead of taking the motor vehicle, turning off taps, and so on –
No act is small. Do help your children with these acts.
