Season 1 and 2

I’ve been a part of the Green Umbrella GC for two years and every year I appreciate it’s mission more and more. The GC works with the NGO Green Umbrella in Cambodia that works to provide education to underprivileged children in Phnom Phen. Over the last two years we’ve raised funds and helped them build school buildings and football fields for their students.

This year, we started off with very focused aims. They were developing a solution for the plastic problem in the area where the school is, encouraging ownership and leadership in students, and forming a mobile library to encourage and spread literacy. These objectives were developed in accordance with the founder and leader of the Green Umbrella NGO, Monk Sokrath.

I started off in the mobile library group, where I wrote a few children’s books that detail different aspects of Cambodia. I wrote a story about their Cambodian scarves, Kramas.
This is one part of the book

After this, I started working with the plastic group. We tried to develop a plastic press that would compress the waste plastic into blocks that kids could potentially play with. Plastic pollution is a rampant problem in all parts of the world, and working on the plastic press gave me a much deeper insight into how big the problem really is. This made me engage with LO6 and LO7.

Season 3 and 4

In season 3 and 4, we had to pause working on our projects, and rather work on planning and executing events to generate more awareness about our GC and cause in our school community. There are different aspects of service, and we recognised that advocacy and research is also as big a part as direct service. Working together and sharing lots of responsibility, we worked to organise our familiy festival fundraiser to get rid of our old product stock. We also organised a dodgeball/Q&A session from grade 11 to raise more awareness about our cause in a fun but informative way.