We recently completed another great term at Climate Ed which brings our second full year of volunteer delivery to an end.
The summer term is always the busiest for us and we were delighted to have 48 volunteers out around various parts of London working with 36 different schools and delivering our climate action programme to over 1300 students. In total this academic year we worked with 69 schools and delivered our programme to over 2800 students.
We were particularly pleased to start work in new boroughs such as Haringey, Islington and Hounslow. We're looking forward to expanding our work in those areas from the autumn onwards.
We judge ourselves on various criteria but one important one is how much we can inspire students and their families to take action on climate change. Embracing lifestyle changes to reduce our carbon emissions is not easy and can sometimes feel like giving up things we like doing. We aim to show people that this doesn't have to be the case! For example, we encourage students to inspire their parents to eat less meat by sharing the insight that eating less of something is actually a way of enjoying it more, as it becomes more of a treat (we do recognise that some people like meat and giving it up altogether can be a challenge). This is just one of many practical insights we share on the programme, to help make transitioning towards a more climate-friendly lifestyle as easy and manageable as possible for students and their families. (Also we don't try to change the children's eating habits - we feel they have the right to choose what they eat).
We were delighted to receive lots of positive feedback from the students we worked with this summer. Here's what some of them said:
100/100! It helped me to think better and it completely changed how I look at the world.
It was so fun. I went home and told my parents and their attitude to climate change is different.
I am very inspired and it makes me want to change the world.