Keep it Clean
Support this projectBased in Estonia, a group of citizens has created an international community of change agents who aim to change behaviours and help create sustainable solutions in local communities !
While the waste problem is a global one, solutions to it are very much local. What’s more, the ‘Keep It Clean’ concept foresees a specific role for different stakeholders in each society. Their approach enables one to embrace the unique characteristics of any community while applying general principles of zero waste, circular economy and non-formal education techniques.
This training program concept has been developed for the following reason – to be used as an implementation tool for making a very own Keep It Clean Plan. Its main aims are:
– Give participants basic skills that will help them to start sustainable waste management initiatives within their communities (municipality or district level).
– Create zero waste leaders and ambassadors.
– Empower participants to be ambassadors in their own communities and inspire them to pass on the skills and knowledge acquired from the training they receive.
Initial Problem
Learning about what a ‘circular economy’ is, does not necessarily help to know HOW to apply its principles in action. While teaching the youth of today about sustainability, from an early age, is important, it is just as important to provide decision-makers and community leaders today the knowledge of how to support change for a sustainable future. Keep It clean recognizes the need for creating more formats for adult education in ESD.
The positive impacts that the project has made:
Keep It Clean allowed the creation of a strong international community of change-makers who exchange best practices and learnings from their initiatives.
They also created and improved new community campaigns to change behavior and help design sustainable solutions. Their community enhancement projects are using waste management as a means of achieving their goals, improving livelihoods and environmental conditions.
What’s more, the ‘Keep It Clean’ concept foresees a specific role for different stakeholders in the society. Their approach enables to embrace the unique characteristics of any community while applying general principles of zero waste, circular economy and non-formal education techniques.
The impacted areas and population:
Keep It Clean empowers and enables organizations and people so they can thrive. More specifically, local decision-makers such as mayors are the first beneficiaries of Keep It Clean’s projects.
The populations and areas of Greece and El Salvador have both been impacted by the Keep It Clean project and its training that provides a broad knowledge of sustainable development as well as waste and resource management.
After participating in Keep It Clean trainings, everyone can become an ambassador in their own local community; to share the knowledge they have gained and create their own initiatives.
The obstacles and challenges
Keep It Clean wanted to prove that resource efficiency and waste-free communities were possible, however, they first failed because the methods used and their goals were too ambitious relative to the situation on the ground and the existing mentalities within the countries they implemented the project.
It doesn’t mean that their end goal – waste-free communities that preserve and regenerate – is impossible to achieve, it just means that they can’t apply their concept of cleaning up communities where the people there already have a fixed mindset. They need more people, coming from different sectors and fields. Keep it Clean needs new skills, any skills that they can use to achieve the next milestone and turn it into a measurable win so that they recover the energy of their first successful event (a cleaning event – a milestone with measurable success of tons of waste cleaned up but it was not THE solution), provided by the collective gratification of the people in the areas they helped clean up.
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These gardens should provide enough food for self-consumption as well as enabling villagers to diversify theIR diet. What’s more, they have the possibility to sell their surplus crops at weekly markets. This initiative thus enables the women to achieve a new social and financial autonomy, as well as to develop their expertise in agriculture.
Planeta Océano: protecting the Giant Manta
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1. Participatory research and citizen science: Local volunteers (fishermen, children, youth, among others) actively investigate local ecosystems, fisheries, and marine species, thus supporting local management efforts. Projects have included assessing shark and ray fisheries, pioneering manta ray conservation in Peru, assessing Traditional Ecological Knowledge on critically endangered sawfish, and supporting Marine Protected Areas.
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The project was conceived from KBF’s three missions: to protect; to explore; to educate. These missions were the guiding elements for the construction of the project’s objective and action areas, which have the following propositions:
PROTECT – Main element of the project that aims to protect the Amazon biome from the restoration of degraded areas through the implementation of agroforestry systems (SAF) in Bela Aurora Community. The project foresaw the planting of 3,000 feet of cupuaçu (in addition to other Integrated species) in the expectation of a production of around 6 tons of seeds in 3-4 years. The strategy adopted to achieve this objective is to transfer technology between family farmers in the community of Bela Aurora and the community of Santa Luzia, in Tomé Açu, which has a history of production in SAFs.
EXPLORE – The pillar aims to systematize and disseminate knowledge from the project’s learning and results, through scientific publications, congresses, etc.
EDUCATE – Consists on conducting workshops with children and young people from the Bela Aurora community, seeking to reinforce the element of environmental education in SAF cultures. This formal moment aims to help develop a more theoretical and critical perception of reality, focusing on the role of human beings in nature, the dynamics of trees in the forest and the importance of preserving biodiversity to maintain the balance of the biome. Within the initiatives aimed at implementing the SAFs, Six training workshops were planned, which involve activities to raise awareness of the importance of restoring degraded areas, preserving the environment and agro-ecological production with family farmers in Bela Aurora.
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