Newcastle Grammar School, Australia “Our Environment: A Responsible Legacy”
On 8th June 2022, seven delegates from grade 7 represented DAIS at a Round Square virtual Conference, “Our Environment: A Responsible Legacy”, hosted by Newcastle Grammar School, Australia. With thought provoking discussions and activities focussed on the local changes one person does to create global impacts, the Conference aimed to build students’ commitment and ambition to act in ways that leave a positive environmental legacy for the future.
The conference started off with the host school introducing themselves and their concerns related to environmental issues. Next, the delegates transitioned into Baraza rooms where they participated in discussions on the icebreaker questions. The baraza groups also shared their school wise Conference Pre task – to discuss the most important environmental initiatives local of them, which have a connection to global challenges and share the collage of images that represent these initiatives and challenges. The baraza hosts also initiated reflections on the pre tasks shared by the different schools.
Back into the main meeting, the delegates interacted with the Keynote Speaker, Cherry Sung, a winner of the 2020 Global Social Leaders Global Goals Competition, one of the 2021 International Young Eco Heroes, a youth environmentalist activist from South Korea.
Cherry is a founder of ‘Greener is Cleaner’, a youth-led organization fuelled by "people-power" that leads by example to empower youth worldwide to act for the environment and thus their futures. In her speech, Cherry highlighted the problems and causes of the unpredictable eco-system issues. The delegates shared their reflections on the speech in their second baraza session.
The next key-note speech in the main meeting focussed on the need to spread awareness about environmental challenges and recognize the potential of the youth in making changes in relation to the environmental problems.
In the baraza session that followed the delegates shared with each other the changes they could make to their environments. In the final segment, the baraza groups shared their learnings in the main meeting before bidding goodbyes to all.
As quoted by the DAIS delegates, “This conference was an amazing experience with an opportunity to understand the global environmental issues, to spread awareness and implement small changes that would create big impacts!
DAIS Student Delegates: Shloka Choudhary, Siddhant Mehendale, Sanaya Chadha, Ayanna Vazirani Arishka Betadpur and Sohum Anand.
DAIS Teacher Delegates: Ms. Sushila Victor