This year, our service group, Housing & Habitat, helped Eco-Schools and our school achieve the green flag certification by FEE (Foundation for Enivronmental Education). In order to achieve such a certificate, we had to set up a meeting with 3 representatives from the FEE and prepare a presentation showing them the steps our school has taken to become more sustainable. 

(Preparing for the meeting – Credit: Geckonet)

During the meeting, we spoke to the representatives of the FEE about road clean-ups we have done, the biogas plant, composting, recycling, and the baton relay which we organized for OSC. We also discussed the garden bed project and the connections the school’s curriculum has to raise awareness around sustainability.

For my part as one of the service leaders for Housing & Habitat, I had to walk the representatives through the steps that were taken in order to build a garden bed. To do so, I created a slide as shown below that gave a step-by-step guide on what we had to do during the building process of the garden beds. As well as that, I added images of our service group building the garden beds to provide a bit of visual aid for the representative of the FEE.

(Talking about the building process – Credit: Ms. Melinda)

At the end of the meeting, we answered some questions the representatives had for our school and our own experiences in OSC as well as Sri Lanka.

Learning Objectives:

L04: In order to achieve the Green Flag, we leaders for many service groups had to spend time in and outside of school planning and creating a whole slide show to present to the representatives. As well as that, we showed commitment by delivering a 2-hour-long presentation as a group of services. Because of our hard work on the projects and the meeting with the FEE, we were rewarded with the green flag

L06: Throughout our meeting, we demonstrated engagement with many issues of global significance such as climate change which our entire school advocated for the baton relay. We also covered topics around food waste and how we avoid these issues by using and raising awareness about our school’s biogas plant. Because of this, the representatives of FEE were impressed with our engagement and efforts to reduce these issues of global significance.