How Do We Educate for Sustainable Development?
May 16, 2016Sustainable Programmes: Environmental Living
June 7, 2016Reflections on Peace Education from the Kompaz Team
2016 is CISV’s year for Sustainable Development. Throughout the year, we will bring you ideas, discussion pieces, materials and resources to help you to explore, educate on, and take action toward Sustainable Development in your Chapter or Programme.
Hello, world!
For those of you who have been reading the blog posts from the Sustainable Development Team, you have seen that we have been focusing on the link between Peace Education and Sustainable Development. For those of you who have not been following… You really should!
The blog has presented various suggestions for activities and sessions that you can do with your local CISV Chapter, or in a camp, or in any other possible scenarios where you want to make people think and learn more about Sustainable Development. This topic is so broad and complex that to find good ways of educating children, youth and adults about it is a very important to CISV.
The mission of CISV is to educate and inspire action for a more just and peaceful world – to educate people to become citizens who actively contribute to making our world better. Sounds easy, right? Or difficult?
Making our world better… We can all do it. Even the smallest of efforts can make a big difference. However, our efforts can be made even better if we increase our knowledge about what we can do. The more we know about sustainability, the more we can enhance our skills to contribute to a society, a world, which will be fruitful and colourful for the generations to come.
We can do it through thinking about the environment, by getting rid of stereotypes and prejudice, by thinking twice before buying something we will throw away in a few months. And of course by doing what CISV does best – to create international friendships, to learn and understand more about other cultures, to accept people for who they are, and to learn to see the best in other people.
But as much as we learn ourselves, we should also do our best to educate and encourage others to live in a sustainable way. Through our job, the Kompaz Team got to talk to the former mayor of Bogotá – Colombia, Antanas Mockus, who said that during his time as a mayor in the 1990s he considered Bogotá to be a classroom with 6 million people. He continued by saying that to make a city better, we must make the citizens better, and to make the citizens better we need an army of teachers… And everybody can be a teacher!
We hope you’ll take these thoughts with you as the 2016 CISV year of Sustainable Development moves along, entering into new areas of focus to make this content area as good as possible.
Yours,
The Kompaz Team
on behalf of the Sustainable Development Team
The Sustainable Development Team includes members of CISV’s Educational Programmes Committee, Kompaz Project, International Junior Branch Team, Communications Team, and the International Office. Our team coordinator is Madeleine Le Bourdon.
