Green Social Enterprise Promotes Environmental Education in India

Making Earth Smile Again (MESA), a social enterprise proactively working to save the environment, has launched an innovative green project aimed at providing effective education on the environment to school children. Over the next few months, the project's scope will be expanded to cover more schools and colleges. The project, which has been named 'My Green School', was recently unveiled at the Sacred Heart Matriculation School in Chennai.

Abdul Ghani of MESA explains the thought process behind the project: "The idea is to make environmental education and the sensibility more prevalent and lasting in the minds of children. Schools take up environmental education only because it is mandatory. It is usually handled by biology or chemistry teachers, who have no expertise in dealing with the subject. That's when we thought of an eco lab like the physics or chemistry lab,"

Ghani adds that children are generally more likely to misunderstand the meaning and purpose of environmental conservation, and they may associate it simply with picking up garbage and litter, and putting in the bins. It is critically important to guide and motivate these impressionable minds about the benefits and necessity of environmental conservation. They need to be familiarized with the concepts of re-use, recycling and composting of waste materials.

He says, "Only if we do this, there will be a foundation and natural drive towards effective environmental conservation. Under our present system, we have no way of understanding such things till we reach college." The Sacred Heart unit is equipped with facilities that help take a close look and participate in the conservative management of waste materials that have been collected on the school campus by the students. Composting of organic wastes would be put on display to showcase the benefits of environmental conservation before these young minds.

MESA has plans to take this program to other parts of the state of Tamil Nadu in India. Ghani says, "We will very soon be opening our centres in Sethu Bhaskara Matriculation School in Ambattur and Nazareth College in Avadi. Our goal is to have at least one of these centres in each district."

Source: Ibnlive

Photo Credit: ambrozjo