Planting mangroves with youth to regenerate degraded sites
Kehkhashan Basu
Title : Environment Academy – an unique education tool for biodiversity education
Green Hope Foundation uses ESD (Education for Sustainable Development) as a transformative tool to bring about behavioral change in local communities, enabling them to learn about their biodiversity, its current state, what the challenges are and how they can mitigate them. The communities we work with have never been to school. There are also language and social barriers, especially with regard to the participation of girls and women in these conservative societies. To circumvent these challenges we use innovative mediums of learnings, such as Art, Music, Dance and Drama to educate the young people in these communities. Since we are youth, this form of peer to peer learning is more effective.
We utilise the youth of these communities to become the drivers of change mechanism in these communities.
- Use of innovative learning tools such as Art, Music, Dance and Drama
- Peer to peer communication
- Amplifying the role of young people in the community as change makers
- Promoting the active participation of young women to lead in decisionmaking and implementation in their biodiversity conservation
These are very traditional and conservative communities. They have been exploited for centuries and this suffering causes them to distrust any form of outside intervention. Our learning was that it takes time to integrate with them, to build trust and thereafter implement our programs. Through this approach, we were able to bring about a transformational behavioral change.