World Environment Day is the United Nations’ most important day for encouraging worldwide awareness and action for the protection of our environment. Since it began in 1974, it has grown to become a global platform for public outreach that is widely celebrated in over 100 countries. Above all, World Environment Day is the ‘people’s day’ for doing something to take care of the Earth and/or become an agent of change. That ‘something’ can be focused locally, nationally or globally; it can be a solo action or involve a crowd – everyone is free to choose.
Each World Environment Day is organized around a theme that focuses attention on a particularly pressing environmental concern. The theme for 2017 is Connecting people to nature. With this knowledge, Rukmini Foundation marked World Environment Day by exploring the importance of the Earth, the issues related with environment degradation and the ways forward to mitigate such issues. We applied different techniques to dissemination the information related the importance of the day. The main theme of our program was waste management and Reuse Reduce and Recycle.
Four of our partner schools: Shikharapur Community School, Arunodaya Secondary School, Pharping Secondary School and Setidevi Secondary School participated in our program, resulting in more than 100 participants. Representatives of each school were assigned a project to construct something made of non degradable waste materials. On the day of the program, the participants got to showcase their product to rest of the students, creating a platform for both creativity and learning.
The students from Pharping School made rubber band bags, flower vase, and a hand fan. Arunodaya school’s participants made flowers and a flower vase made from waste plastic. Shikharapur students came up with toys, bags, photo frames, and dustbin. While the students from Setidevi made penholder, torch light and many others goods.
It was exciting to go around and see what students from each school had made from waste, and I was also able to learn a lot about ways to preserve our environment.
Team RukuBot (Rukmini Foundation’s Robot Team) played a vital role in making the event more innovative, as they made various items from the waste like Bird feeder from waste bottle, plastic spoon light and many other. Team RukuBot also exhibited their creative side by making a beautiful street art with vibrant colors to raise awareness for deforestation and saving the environment. Our interns from Kerala India did Environment Day based presentation in our Rukmini Smart Interactive Class. At the end of the program foundations chairperson awarded certificate to all participants’ school.
This program was extremely meaningful and a huge success, as we were able to help scholars and our community learn about the importance of Environment Day and create more awareness on how to preserve Mother Nature in a fun and educational way. The participants also learned how “Reuse, Reduce and Recycle” will help make environment clean and healthy. We hope that the young minds will advocate this important day and they will work as preservers and help create a better living environment.
A program like this which involves participation of various different school is essential in not just raising awareness of issues like Environment and Climate change, but is a wonderful platform to encourage students to showcase their hidden talents.
