The Green School - Advancing a Step Towards Sustainable Behaviour
The Green School Initiative launched in April 2017 by Tata Steel Foundation and TERI aims to promote behaviour change for environmental conservation and develop resilience among vulnerable communities through driving school ecosystems by exploring curriculum linkages, operationalizing action projects and capacity-building activities on four broad themes: Energy, Water, Forest & Biodiversity, and Waste and their interlinkages with Climate Change and Sustainable Development Goals Agenda 2030. To date, the program’s direct beneficiaries are students and teachers at the targeted schools of Jharkhand and Odisha. The indirect beneficiaries are the school administration and local community members involved in the initiative. The initiative focusses on augmenting students (middle school students) through an activity-based teaching programme, which train students and teachers to promote the message of climate change mitigation and adaptation to the broader society. The previous phase- Phase V (2022-23) impacted nearly 11169 students, 371 teachers, and 5217 community members in and around 45 targeted schools across Joda, Noamundi, Khondbond, Jajpur, Sukinda, Meramandli, West Bokaro, and Jharia in Odisha and Jharkhand. In this way, the initiative instigated significant awareness inculcation and promoted behaviour change in the country's vulnerable communities. The main distinguishing feature of Phase V of the initiative was to develop peer education and knowledge transfer systems to realize the actions for sustainability at a larger scale. Phase V achieved this through the constitution of the Environment Management Committee (EMC), Environmental Impact Review (EIR), the establishment of the Green Libraries, and similar activities in the associated schools for powering students and teachers to be the agent of change in their respective communities.
About Advancing a Step Towards Sustainable Behaviour: Phase VI (2023-24)
Further developing upon the initiatives made in Phase V, Advancing a Step Towards Sustainable Behaviour: Phase VI will now aim at mainstreaming climate change, INDCs, and Sustainable Development Goals, which the initiative was initially based upon. The working of EMCs constituted in the previous phase will be enhanced. The phase will further work towards powering the peer education and knowledge transfer systems, providing contextual flexibility to schools for selecting their themes, target audience, and set of activities to achieve better and optimum outcomes. Including new schools (around 90) under the initiative will further function as the driver for knowledge transfer opportunities and imbibing the sense of voluntary community actions for achieving true environmentalism.
