Examples and the girls-participants’ personal experiences

The following missions examples and the girls-participants’ personal experiences clearly state that if more women were encouraged to lead the way in resolving climate issues, the majority of them would outsource their knowledge to the well-established study that is climate science. In their testimonies, the girls vividly demonstrate how climate change-based learning developed their climate change sensitive identities:

Marzena, 17 years old, Piastow secondary school, Poland

I'm Marzena and I'm 17 years old. I come from Poland, and study in a nearby town's Piastów's high school as a biology-chemistry major. The city I study in has interchangable, irregular periods of drought and flooding, making functioning somewhat tricky.

Whenever there is heavy rain, the streets turn into literal lakes, which causes travelling on both pavement and road to be tricky. Cars can't move around as freely due to the risk of skidding or avoiding splashing the people walking with the water. Travelling on foot is harder because of the roads being lower than pavements, making it nearly impossible to cross the road, you have to be cautious around cars because of the possibility of a car driving through a big puddle, and so on and so on.

In my first year of High School, our biology teacher introduced us to Erasmus +. The two missions on hand were OSS and Climate Change. Though I didn't contribute much to OSS, when I heard about Climate Change I had a feeling that would cater more to my personal interests. I was sold as soon as the teacher mentioned the topic of our project under the mission would be retention. I knew I wanted to engage in the project and make a better reality.

On the first class dedicated to our project, we were introduced to an organisation promoting feemale teenage activity in the political, social or local circles. They had a site where you signed up and got assigned a mentor for your mission. On the site you also had multiple tools, such as a detailed planner, guides, articles about project organisation, planning, leading and much more. We divided ourselves into 3 groups and divided our retention project into 2 subprojects;

Flowery Meadows which was about making a meadow around the carways surrounding our city in order to contribute to retention by using plants to regulate the water distribution naturally
H20 The Container Is Enough, in which our girls planned a contest for the younger folk to design a sustainable, small-scale retention holder
Small Retention In A Nutshell, where we arranged a sort of audience with our younger friends from local primary schools in order to pass on what there is to know about the topic of small retention”.

I was assigned the leader of the Small Retention In A Nutshell project. It was actually really tough navigating 6 people and leading them well. I found it difficult finding and sharing motivation for doing what there was to do, and much more. However eventually we managed to all learn about the subject, put together an excellent presentation and think of ways to make our ted talk more engaging.

It felt really good to know that you're seeding a seed of knowledge in the heads of the children who are the future of our town, and hopefully also passing on the information from them to their parents. Personally, I enjoyed the fact we're doing something good for the years to come and I know that by taking the small step forward, I contributed to a chain of following events.

I hope, however, that I am able to continute on the journey of making the world a better place to live in, even if it means having to take very small, seemingly irrelevant steps in order to get to the end goal”.