By Lili Mihalics
No achievement should be passed by without a proper celebration and the 2024 SEEd Young Changemakers students have surely achieved quite something. For over a year, groups of students from different backgrounds and schools designed and led their own action-learning projects, demonstrating systems thinking, re-imagining various aspects of school life, and finally presented their learning outcome to each other at our end of programme celebration day in June.
Some projects set out to educate the school community on various aspects of sustainability. The media for communicating their messages included speaking at assemblies, making posters, creating a school newsletter and even a sustainability podcast. As a student noted, it can be crucial to note the positive aspects of sustainability issues rather than only focussing on what is wrong.
Other groups focused on growing plants to help educate other students and influence reduction of food waste. Students noted that being aware of the complexity of the mechanisms that allow us to enjoy our food, helps to change behaviours and attitudes – could systems thinking be more visible than that? Another goal behind growing was to increase biodiversity in school grounds, making a sensory garden with wild flowers, and creating space-efficient vertical planting schemes where there was lack of green space for planting. A sensory garden was planted up with wild flowers – here we could also hear about the connection between mental health and connection to nature from the presenters.
Tackling fast fashion and materialism was also a popular theme that a number of projects were based on. Students organised visible mending workshops for younger students, a swap shop and several events for shopping second-hand ‘teens stuff’. Other groups of students created accessible recycling points for e-waste and even vapes, highlighting the importance of making the action relevant to young people to encourage change in behaviour.
Teen Stuff – a project organised by Stroud High School students on the SEEd Young Changemakers programme and run over several Saturdays throughout the year
One group of students successfully gained budget approval from school management for solar panels to be installed at the school. They managed to set up a meeting with the local authority to discuss applying solar panels at their school but unsurprisingly, they are still waiting for their answer. Yes, it is perfectly fine to have an idea, come up with a plan, face many barriers that you can either manage to overcome or not. Adults might be too rigid in our approach, or just too afraid of failure to the extent that we forget that all learning at every age requires trial and error.
The students who participated in the SEEd Young Changemakers programme managed to keep motivated after setbacks and to step away from designing ‘the perfect plan’ and actually just start working towards their goals. Most importantly, what they learned from this year was that no change is easy, that you will face difficulties, and that it is okay to be imperfect – something they managed to teach the anxious adults just by using their voice and being open about all their ups and downs.
