This year, we at YEE started our Climate Campaign. The campaign is focused on the perils of global warming and it strives to get involved in the fight against this issue. At the same time, other purpose of the campaign is to raise awareness among people and to tell them that every one of us can make a difference, regardless of its magnitude.

Therefore, from the get-go, we decided that our campaign should have a wide impact, focusing on reaching people from all over Europe. In order to make things easier, but also to create something more long-term, we created a booklet with a guidelines for organising a climate change event/ workshop.  

Since EVS is all about new experience, I was the one who accepted the responsibility to creating the design of the booklet. The content was already done by everyone in the office, so I decided to try myself into this new area. Luckily, I found an online platform {canva.com} with a simple UI and many options. After a whole day of work, the masterpiece was done and you can see the result HERE.

The next step was to promote the booklet and the whole campaign at the Annual Meeting in order to attract  organisation as a potential partners. We were happy that there were many interested people.

The highpoint of the campaign was from 14 to 27 September, days called YEE Climate Week, and during this period the partners organised a local workshop event. The office decided to give me and Judit, the EVS volunteers, more autonomy in creating the event and the two of us decided to choose each one a workshop and combine them together. Me, being a huge movie buff, decided to go for a movie screening of a climate change-related documentary. Admittedly, I didn’t have much knowledge about documentaries about this topic, so I did some research online and then I put several movies for an office voting. The movie that received the highest votes was “Chasing Ice”, a 2012 documentary that follows the dissapearence of glaciers in the period of 6 years.  My next step was to contact the distributers of the movie and ask for a screening permission. Since the campaign is a grassroot one, meaning that we don’t have specific funding for it, the distribution company {big thanks to Sierra} agreed to let us screen the movie for free.

The next thing that we did is securing a location. Luckily, one of my favorite places for hanging in Prague, Café V Lese, allowed us to use part of their locale. As far as the promotion goes, we promoted the event on many social platforms, and also put posters on several places in Prague [poster made by yours truly on the incredible canva.com]

I should also use this opportunity to publicly thank International Young Naturefriends [IYNF] for being equally involved in the event, from the promotion, to the set up. They also used this opportunity to promote our COP21 initative that is also connected to climate change. In a nutshell, at the end of November, IYNF and YEE are going to Paris in order to join the march against climate change that will occur at the same time while the world’s biggest climate conference.  We have exciting things ahead of us and there will definitely be some good news in near future, so stay tuned….

Back to the event, I can say that it went good. The movie screening was fallowed by an interesting discussion, we gathered some donation for COP21’s trip, and Judit’s calculation of the ecological footprint made several people [including me] realise that that they should put more effort to be more environmentally-friendly. Furthermore, this was the most independent thing that we as EVS volunteers did. Of course, there were some stressful moments [for example, securing a popular movie from the other side of the world] but at the end I can say that I can reap the benefits in the form of a valuable experience that enabled me to see some things about myself, about my skills about my way of work and.

Until next time,