Recently on the 15th of September, Me and my fellow Eco-Schools leader Sasindu took up on the opportunity to present Eco-Schools to the school board and parents. Our intention was to tell the parents about our goals, accomplishments and future plans in order to get their further support as they are a part of the committee. I had to challenge my speaking skills as this was the first time I had a major role in a presentation, especially in small groups. So to do this I took initiative to do a bunch of planning on the the slides, creating an outline for the script and what we would mention briefly vs. in more detail.

We talked a bit about what Eco Schools is and how many schools are a part of this, before informing them on the 7 steps required to become accredited with the Eco Schools Green Flag which is our ultimate goal. The steps of the action plan, monitoring and evaluating took a lot of commitment as we would constantly have to revisit our aims and ensure they were being met. Often there are times during this process that people drop out of Eco-Schools for an “easier” service, so to all those still in the service past this point they had shown lots of perseverance.

We went over our eco-code, showed in figure 2, and told them our mission statement which is ‘to reduce the eco-logical footprint (environmental footprint) of the OSC community’. Then we showed them our chosen themes, the other service groups we collaborate with as the Eco-Club, our accomplishments, goals and how they could help us. The latter being very important as we can only be an eco school with the support of the whole community. I had to highlight how we weren’t only benefiting our immediate community and surroundings, but by our ethical decisions we were operating on a much larger scale helping the world.

Overall this was a great experience as I was able to practice my public speaking and presenting which helped a lot with my confidence. Me and Sasindu worked collaboratively together to plan our presentation, add in key speaking notes and speaking to the audience. Being able to attend this meeting and bring forward the message of Eco-School at OSC was a step towards global engagement since the parents, board members and faculty members attending are from all over the world and they can use the takeaways from our meetings and actions and implement them in their communities abroad. After this meeting Dr. Kleiss, the head of school, commended us for our presentation in an email to the whole school which led to many people complimenting our courage to present in front of such a big audience.

Featured Image Credit: Ms Fert