The CAS Project is a major part of the CAS system, consisting of independent planning and execution of a project in any aspect of CAS. This can be anything like service, performing a musical piece or helping in a sports activity. As I am very passionate about nature conversation as I love birding, I decided to contribute to conservation. The planning of this project was unfortunately more lengthy than it should have been, mainly due to communication difficulties with a partner for our intended project. I collaborated with Milo, one of my classmates, who is also eager to stop environmental degradation. Our initial idea was to raise funds for reforestation in Borneo but speaking to our CAS supervisor prompted us to do something more local. We therefore got into contact with a small organization that has a project to protect a wetland on the outskirts of Colombo, Sri Lanka, where I live. We communicated a meeting time at the site to get an idea of what could be done, but after a while, we did not receive a reply, so we abandoned that project and returned to the idea of deforestation.
Borneo is one of the largest islands in the world, and I have been there before and was amazed by the rainforests. Unfortunately, these forests and their inhabitants, which include Bornean Oragnutans, one of the animal species most closely related to humans, suffer from extensive deforestation. This project was aimed at collecting funds for reforestation projects, and raise awareness on palm oil production, the leading cause for deforestation in Borneo, in order to increase public understanding of this very important issue.
We broke the project up into two parts, one of which was the awareness program and the other the fundraiser. The awareness aspect was done over Instagram, and we created three types of posts that were posted in rotation. The first type was intended to show the beauty and richness of the rainforests, the second was posts showing the problem and facts of deforestation and the last were posts showing ways to ensure your contribution to deforestation, such as by avoiding products that contain palm oil. To ensure that both of us have an independent part of the planning, we split up the creation of the posts. Since I have been to Borneo, I created the first kind of posts as I could use my own photos. Milo created the ‘problem posts’ while we did the ‘solution posts’ together.
The fundraiser was organised together. We however split up small components, including that Milo organised the food to be sold and I got shirts done so that we could sell things at the Food and Fun fair, a school event for which we rented a stand. We chose an organisation to donate the funds to, based on reviews and the way in which they use money, since we wanted our donation to be effective as possible.
My next post will explain how we actually carried out the project, how we raised the funds and to what organization we donated the money.