At the beginning of our service session, Ms. Clover showed us the speech that Greta Thunberg did at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York. This brought about the discussion about our school’s participation in the climate strike called “Fridays for Future” on the 20th or 27th of September. “Fridays for Future” is an international movement led by Greta Thunberg that encourages school students to leave class to participate in demonstrations in front of government to demand action to prevent further global warming and climate change. As a service group, we decided that the climate strike discusses an issue of global importance that we need to address in our community.
Our service group began discussing ideas and plans but since it was in the following two weeks, we decided we were going to need support from more people. Alex and I decided to call a meeting with the service leaders and the SGA Exco to explain our idea and discuss a possible plan for the day. The major difficulty that we were faced with was safely having students leave the school and walk to a government building (which there were none of nearby). Therefore, we had to come up with an alternative solution to contribute to this cause. After discussing for several breaks and lunchtimes we came up with a final plan of conducting a walkout of the whole of secondary school at 12:00pm to the auditorium. During this gathering we would give a speech to show a video and explain the strike. Then we would hand out paper for people to write a letter to the Environmental Minister requesting to create or change policies to reduce Sri Lanka’s contribution to the climate crisis. After that we would send out a pledge that people could sign that entails different action that can be taken to reduce our school’s impact on the environment.
On the day of the strike we stood at the entrance of the school with posters that we made raising awareness about meeting at the auditorium at 12:00pm that day. As well as that, the day before Alex made a digital poster that was spread across social media which helped spread the word. Once the bell had rung for homeroom, we decided to skip homeroom and walk around the school with our posters. Then at 12:00pm the whole of secondary school walked to the auditorium where a short speech was made by several DP2 service leaders and a video of Greta Thunberg was shown. After this the audience got involved in writing letters to the government or specifically the environmental minister of Sri Lanka about the need for action which we collected after. Finally the pledge was introduced and explained for people to fill out later in the day if they wish.
