Story – RASA Resilience and Sustainability in Action 2 – Youth exchange in United Kingdom

RASA Resilience and Sustainability in Action is a learning experience to raise awareness about sustainability challenges, connect to nature, the people around us and our own inner motivation and support each other to take action for a better place.

RASA aims to address sustainability through raise awareness about the global sustainability challenges that we are facing (climate change, air pollution etc) and understanding the science behind it – through systems thinking – the specific social, environmental and economic developments that has lead us to this state.

We want to connect to nature, the people around us and our own inner motivation – finding the personal source of motivation while re-connecting to nature through outdoor activities and nature education in a group setting (the social context).

Lets support to take action, in particular through finding the answers to the questions: What can each one of us do? How can we join the movement in our own way, with our own methods and talents? What can we do in our daily life, in our work, in our communities? How to engage more young people to join us, to care and to take action for a more sustainable world?

Lets think about how to develop knowledge, skills and attitudes to be the change agents in our everyday life and in our communities (among those: leadership, problem solving, communication, initiative-taking, working in groups and social context, being productive team-members, effective usage of resources, understanding complex systems and cause-effect relationships, learning to learn, outdoor life, personal development and self awareness)

In these videos, participants share their learnings and talk about local solutions in resilience and sustainability in action using a genre: horror, surrealism, comedy, sci-fi, documentary.

Arrival Day

30 participants and 7 leaders from UK, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Spain, Poland, Bulgaria gathered in the first part of RASA Resilience and Sustainability in Action youth exchange in Kennington, United Kingdom.

Introduction

Our first day we spent on getting to know each other, our countries, cultures, beliefs… We explored the surroundings and aclimatized with the place. We are excited to be here and can’t wait for upcoming activities!

Climate simulation

On our amazing second day we spent the morning by carring out a simulation of climate change. By playing games and casually chatting we came up with a lot of solutions for the positive change needed to stop the climate crisis

Creative Solutions

Today we exploited our manual and creative skills by drawing, painting, acting, potting plants and making handmade soaps and detergents. In order to do that we had to gather our energy by connecting our body and mind through yoga sessions and meditation.

Connecting with Locals

Yesterday we had a great and challenging day exploring Canterbury, Dover and Ashford.
Living new experiences, talking to locals and exploring sustainability and resilience around us!

Permaculture

Today we went from the global to the local level working with permaculture ethics, principles and we designed our own piece of land.

Video Making – finding solutions

Today we were preparing videos about human behavior, the environment, all kinds of waste (energy, food, water, etc.) and the challenges we take up for the sake of nature.

Gratitude and Action

Nooo it was our last day in paradise 🥲

We shared our gratitude by doing a little excusion to clean our Mother Earth. Each group took a couple of plastic bags and went to do some community work. So satisfying! 🥬♻🌱

Then we thought of the action we can implement in our local communities so the idea of the RASA project lives on 📉

We also reminiscenced about our time together and reflected on what we’ve learned in this intense week.

We celebrated new friendships and embraced the new energy to create some beautiful change in the world of the greener future which starts NOW 🌏