Is the crisis an opportunity to make society more sustainable?

The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and its associated measures pose challenges for us all.

Shall we choose to see this crisis as an opportunity to find new ways of organising our lives, the lives of our communities and to make society more sustainable?

This is the theme for an online conference that Life Link Friendship Schools together with SSHL are hosting, taking place right now. During 7 weeks the participating school teams will explore this theme and plan a project that can be implemented by the teams once physical gatherings are safe and local restrictions are lifted.

All Life-Link Friendship schools located around the world are invited to participate. Life Link together with SSHL organises recurring international conferences. This year’s conference includes participants from 23 schools with 33 teachers and 147 students from nearly all continents around the world. SSHL will participate with 5-7 students and one teacher.

The projects have three focus areas

1 Transport: What can we do to make transport more sustainable in consideration of ourselves, others and nature?

2 Consumption: How do our consumption habits relate to ourselves, others and nature? We are all consumers and can choose to be more or less sustainable through our consumption. Application of the 3 R’s Reduce, Re-use, Re-cycle applies.

3 Food: Is it produced under sustainable and ecologically sound conditions? Is it possible to reduce the ecological footprint? How do our food choices influence ourselves, others and nature?

Care for myself, for others and for nature

Each school team is to produce a detailed plan for a project relating to the assigned focus area and answers the questions: why, who, how, when, where and what, and builds on Life-Link’s 3 C’s: Care for myself, care for others, care for nature.

The theme of this conference stands in line with several of SSHL’s school organisations’ vision of how to pursue SSHL’s work on education for sustainable development, for example SSHL DTG, Think Tank, Kenya Project and Make a Kid Smile, as seen in the article “Sustainability in Design” (International School Leader Magazine) written by Principal Carina Nilsson.