CAPs Friday 19/3/10

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Read about The Green Initiative, Yara’s CAP from Kuwait!

 

The Green Initiative so far

 

For a country with so much oil, power, and money, it was lacking a green vision. That’s where the inspiration to start The Green Initiative came from.

The Green Initiative has a clear mission to raise awareness about climate change through education and innovation. Education would be through schools, presentations, and through our online outlets. Innovation is through the arts, that is social arts, media, photography, 3-D, fashion, and mixed media.

 

As soo as I got the OK for the CAP, we launched a temporary website. However, as time progressed we launched our official website. We were also approached by a fellow Global Changemaker in Kuwait to launch a full site, on her server, with a proper domain and everything, for free. This was great news, and we went ahead with it. It took almost a whole month to launch the new website, but it was worth it. Averaging 400 views/week, it was search engine optimised, therefore people googling us actually found us, and we had a lot more people interested in working with us.

The proper website also increased our credibility, whether it was when contacting organisations, or simply being visited.

 

People living in the Middle East can relate to how there’s nothing set in stone in this region: although schools plan their calendars 3 years in advance, the governments can step in often and throw everyone off track – which is what happened with us. The schedule change imposed by the government for Ramadan pushed our schedule back a few months, and we’re yet to visit two of the three private schools we had approached.

We have, however visited 4 public schools, and introduced a recycling program into one of them, with plans to do the same for the remaining schools.

 

For the innovation part of the program, we ran a photography competition. After a rocky starts, and receiving 18 entries, we decided to change the age limit from 16-19 to 12-19. As soon as this happened, our inbox started flooding with entries and ironically, most of the new entries were from people within the initial 16-19 age range. Once the competition ended, we had 218 entries in total, which was great. The competition was judged by David de Rothschild, the mentor for The Green Initiative. A photography exhibition has been organised, and is set to start on Thursday the 18th of March. The event will be opened by Al-Shiekha Sheikha Al-Sabah, a member of the ruling family in Kuwait, and a huge human rights activist.

 

A week before the photography competition’s deadline, we approached En.v Earth – an organisation that raises awareness for social responsibility in the Arab World. En.v Earth runs an annual Reuse Exhibition, where people use mixed media art to make 3-D objects from reused products. Reuse 3.0 welcomed 12 entries from our photography competition, and we agreed to showcase them at the exhibition. This was a great opportunity, and helped us reach several members of parliament, ambassadors, and high profile guests.

 

Although we were initially asked to print the photographs professionally, they changed their mind last minute and wanted us to project the photographs instead. With 4 hours to find a screen projector, the cheapest we found would cost us twice as much as we paid for printing – a night. However, the first school to take The Green Initiative, The British School of Kuwait, offered to lend us one for free. The exhibition worked out in the end, with MP’s Dr Rola Dashti and Aseel Al-Awadhi watching our full slideshow when they visited the exhibition.

In the spirit of raising awareness and spreading the green message, a team of volunteers at The Green Initiative headed out to the first Green Film Festival in Kuwait, The Green Caravan, and distributed reusable CD’s with tips on how to go green, as well as an overview of our program. The purpose of using CDs rather than printed leaflets was to reduce the ecological footprint of the program.

 

The creative director of the project, Jackie Lewinton, is a member of the Girl Guides association in Kuwait; they too have taken The Green Initiative. They even had their own no impact weekend and even invited us to give our presentation.

We’ve also organised two beach cleanups. We decided to go to a semi-polluted popular beach, rather than a deserted dirty one, so that people would see us cleaning the beach. Many would take second looks, and wonder what we were doing, but some of them even joined us.

 

Yara