Global Citizenship magazine for schools

Forest Changemakers

An inspiring story of how young people in the Highlands created an SDG trail in Abriachan forest.

Forest Changemakers

Whilst the current global Pandemic has placed restrictions on all our lives, young people from across the Highlands have been working to find creative ways to respond in our new reality. As part of the EU Start the Change Project run by Highland One World, two groups of Changemakers have been working in partnership with Abriachan Forest Trust to create a Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) trail to raise public awareness, and encourage local action on the Global Goals.

Youth led learning

Brora Learning Zone Manager and Changemaker group facilitator Trish Matthews explains: “We really wanted to try and link together a lot of the climate change work we had started before the pandemic at the Learning Zone in Brora. A lot of the young people I had been working with were very creative, so the idea of making a conservation gallery of endangered local and global species, that two of the group came up with, seemed a perfect idea for SDG’s 14 and 15. Before lockdown, we had planned to make an animation film with the Caithness Youth Forum (at their request), so instead of putting this on hold until after the pandemic, we were able to work with a small group of the members and an animator to design and create two short climate action adverts for the project.

Young people…. helped create a series of mosaic portraits of inspiring women around the world for SDG 5

Creating the trail

The final missing piece for this project came from the Abriachan Forest Trust who were looking to redevelop the old peace trail and follow on with their own climate action youth work. Together we came up with the idea of upcycling the Peace Trail, some old elm tree slices and way markers into a Global Goals QR code trail. As visitors walk round the trail, they will come across posts representing the 17 Goals. Each post contains a QR code which reveals more information on each goal, and living examples of local and global projects which inspire action. Visitors can also use the codes to see the films and artwork made by the groups.

Young people from Abriachan worked mainly on the physical transformation of the trail and helped create a series of mosaic portraits of inspiring women around the world for SDG 5, whilst the other clusters of groups worked on the galleries, posters and films. Hence our name – The Cluster Changemakers.

Coming together

Working around COVID guidelines was quite a challenge. We used a variety of different ways of engaging with young people: on line support meetings; emails; texts and even activity packs dropped at people’s doors to help with the conservation gallery. For those that lived nearby, or had their own transport, we could organise outdoor learning sessions based in local forest venues. Some of the work was carried out sitting socially distanced at picnic tables! There’s no doubt that being able to meet up and work together on something positive and meaningful was of great value to everyone.

We used a variety of different ways of engaging with young people: on line support meetings; emails; texts and even activity packs dropped at people’s doors!

The basic framework of the trail is in place and work continues. The next stage of the trail is to develop more global citizenship resources and curricular activities ready for when we get the go ahead to be able to run school visits and field trips again.”

The Global Goals trail can also be accessed by members of the general public. To see more of the trail, watch this short film.

Noticeboard

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