To eliminate plastic, and to make our land a sweet home where it is friendly to both humans and the environment

My classmates and I teamed up as Unplastify Youth(UP in short) in September, 2020. Through practicing environmental education again and again, I’ve obtained two secret weapons which help engage people in addressing sustainability issues. The first one is to turn learners into educators. UP has held multiple seminars and workshops before, but found the effectiveness lower than our original expectations. Only a few participants make long term differences after our education program. However, things are totally the opposite for volunteering programs. We found that almost everyone who's ever been our volunteer, keeps passing on the concept of using less plastic even when the events have ended for 3 months! Therefore, we started to replace typical environmental education programs with volunteer opportunities. Moreover, through providing opportunities to design their own unplastify plans as a senior, I enable the juniors to bring people together and take action to fight climate change, just like I do. We will all one day graduate from Unplastify Youth and walk on different paths. By applying skills we learnt now, I believe that we will be able to make bigger impacts in our professional fields in the future.

The second is to meet people’s needs. Aside from UP, I’m also the partner of a social enterprise named “Green Elephant”, and the leader of the campus greening projects in our school. At first, not many students were interested in this topic. However, after I combined campus greening with food education, many started to join me. After all, who doesn't like to eat? My approach turns out to be a huge success. Not only do we have a much more beautiful school now, I’ve also won the silver medal in the Geography Olympiad for this action, and students are more willing to practice campus greening. Another example is the book fair I held. I introduced books concerning environmental topics of different working fields, providing examples of how people in different areas save our planet. I would want people to know that they can do many things for our plant without “giving up earning money”. Everyone who visited my book fair agreed that they are capable of and will do more for the environment.

official site: https://www.youthleader.com.tw/
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