Helene is a former participant of the 7th session. During Hemispheres training, she had the opportunity to increase her knowledge about peasant agriculture and to discover some tools of global education.

She left the training with lots of ideas for her local event with the objective to re-use what she learned during Hemispheres’ session.

A specific public: the teenagers

She decided to organize different workshops for teenagers during school time. “I chose to deal with sustainable development with teenagers. They must be aware of our system which respects neither environment nor people and be aware of a possible alternative: sustainable development.”

Helene organized one afternoon of sensitization in high school with a class of thirty students. The objective is to discover sustainable development step by step.

How to introduce sustainable development?

In order to break the ice and to deal with social relations and tolerance, she implemented a first workshop named “How to say hello”. A nationality with the traditional way to say hello is given to each participant. They must introduce themselves to each student with their name and their nationality. “It was just perfect to see in a funny way how a common thing as salutation could be different depending on the country.” Jeanne, 12 years old.

Actually the most interesting part is not the game but the debriefing. Are those salutations all true or are there stereotypes? The participants were really involved in the debate and aware of the power of stereotypes and the way they can affect relations.

In a second time Helene animated the Chair game discovered during Hemisphere training. The objective of this game is to bring to light the inequalities of wealth between the different continents and the impact of each one on the environment. The students were very surprised of those differences. “Off course I knew that some countries were poorer than our but I couldn’t imagine that the difference was so big. But the most interesting was to learn why.” Thomas, 12 years old.

With these two games Helene introduced the different topics of sustainable development. And the equation is quite simple:

Cultural diversity + Social progress + Sustainable economy + Ecology = Sustainable Development

Some place to speak in secondary school

In order to conclude her initiative, she implemented a Word Carrier in an other secondary school about youth questions.

• Is politic only for adults?
• Is ecology only blablabla?
• How youth can be involved?

“I really appreciated this afternoon because for the first time we learnt things through games and it was not boring. In addition we had the space to speak! Everybody spoke, even the more introverted of us. In a class of 30 students we don’t have time to express ourselves and most of the time it’s just for answering to the teacher’s questions.” Marine, 13 years old.

Tanks to Hemispheres Helene became a real “go between” of solidarity.