The Glocal Education conference today was not only inspiring, it housed the first meeting of the Children’s Association for Nature. Gl0cal is a combination of global and local, how local action contributes to global change. It’s also about how when tackling global issues you need to think about the problems in your own community, and about how change really starts within one individual.

First there was a speaker, the co-founder of 4REAL, a movement which combines media, music, dance, and culture to inspire young people to take action for the environment. The talk was very interesting, although hiphop and the modern sort of music is not really my thing.

Next everyone split up into thier seperate groups for each workshop. I was doing the WildEd one. We did some really cool activities. One of them involved talking with different people in the workshop about different aspects of your experiences in nature. There were several video clips we watched. We did one activity where when you wanted to say something about the earth you would put up both hands to catch the earthball. Overall it was an inspiring workshop although I fear that I will not be able to adequetly describe it.

After a short lunch break, instead of going to the next workshop all the kids from the 5 schools who me and Zoë invited went downstairs and had a meeting for about an hour. Unfourtunately, Zoë had to go home because she was not feeling well. First we discussed things each of our schools were doing to help the environment, and afterwards we talked about ideas for what we could do. Most of them had to do with fundraisers, and were one of the the two parts of them: How to raise the money and what to give it to. We all voted for one of each of the three things which were something that was not a fundraiser and the two parts of a fundraiser. In the end the decision was to start a garden at Gladstone because it is near all the other schools and has lots of space, while for the fundraiser to raise money through a craft fair to protect the Amazon rainforest.