Green Hope Foundation

Funding is the greatest constraint to our work , since most donors still look at my age ( I am 20 now ) first and not my work ( for 12 years now). The Elevate Prize money will help me to :

1. Achieve financial stability and enable me to firm up a 3 year project line

2. It will support two of our ongoing projects in Bangladesh ( empowering Covid affected communities) and Liberia ( IT literacy for girls)

3. Mentorship , media and development support from the Elevate team 

4. Legalise our status in the USA as a 501.3c 

I began my changemaking as an 8 year old with a no plastics campaign. For the next 4 years, I worked within the community, on environmental conservation campaigns and it was then that I realised three important lessons 

a)young people had rights but did not know about it and adults didnt care

b)children like me had no platform through which they could learn about environmental problems and how to take actions

c) This wasn't a problem that could be solved individually. We needed to come together

I was invited to speak at Rio+20 in 2012 and there too I saw the same issues and inequality - adults and  even youth from developed affluent nations speaking on behalf of the poor and deprived. I found this to be grossly unfair and on my return from Rio+20 , established Green Hope Foundation (www.greenhopefoundation.com) . 

We began with environmental campaigns but quickly realised that there were deeper issues of human suffering and societal inequality that needed to addressed and our work evolved into creating a more sustainable world, with the mission of giving a voice to those who are the farthest first, using ESD (Education for Sustainable Development ) as transformative tool.

There are 2 parts to our work:

In developing countries, we work with migrant, vulnerable, persecuted communities. The problems are unique and specific to each community ranging from access to clean water, lack of sanitation, or electricity , employment , gender violence. At the root of it all is a lack of education and skill that prevents these communities from becoming self-sufficient.

For each community that we choose to work with we start by providing skills based education, targeting the young people and in particular girls as lead advocates of change. Thereafter, we provide the required infrastructure support – for example in Bangladesh, we have adopted a Covid impacted community- building toilets, sexual health training for the women and girls, installing deep bore tube wells and rainwater harvesting to address their clean water issues and then making them economically self sufficient through sustainable agriculture for the men and poultry farming for the women. We have also established a learning centre for the children and plan to build a school. Similarly in Liberia, we are installing solar panels in villages and empowering girls through IT literacy.

In developed nations, we partner with school boards to provide sustainability education to young people.

Our work is based on the premise that local actions lead to solutions for global problems, as opposed to a top-down approach. Our innovation lies in the way we use education to empower vulnerable communities to find solutions to their own problems by becoming self-reliant. Since our work is global, we have language barriers as well as cultural and social restrictions since most of the communities we empower are very conservative. These communities have a deep sense of mistrust given that they have always been exploited. To overcome these barriers our advocacy is built on unique communication methods that use Art, Music, dance, sport and drama, that helps to break the ice, build trust and thereafter we embark on skills and vocational training to solve their particular need.

The involvement of children, some as young 6, in leading workshops and teaching adults makes our work disruptive and unique. We train these children, providing them with the knowledge and support, to conduct our workshops.

Adults are often awed when they hear their children speak such wisdom, and this sets forth the process of change, and it works globally- in a refugee camp as well as in a school in Toronto.

Our work is at a grassroots level working with extremely vulnerable and marginalised communities . Our advocacy tool is called “Environment Academy” where we train children and young people of the target community to provide skills based education . We support them thereafter in converting this knowledge into solutions, while providing the necessary infrastructure. These are our impact metrics:

-       220 academies conducted in 25 countries

-       142,000 people impacted , amongst them 97,000 are from vulnerable communities in the developing world

-       Adopted a cluster of Covid impacted villages of 6000 residents , building toilets, clean water systems, children education centres, building income streams through agriculture for the men and poultry farming for the women

-       In a rural Liberian community of 2200 people, we have installed solar panels to provide electricity to homes, community centre, school and also street lighting to provide safe spaces for girls and young boys. They are receiving IT skills education that will lead to their economic self-reliance.