Ideas That Could Change the World

TCS student and teacher representatives of GIN traveled to Panama city during March 8th-13th for the 2017 Global Issues Network conference.

Throughout three days, students presented what they had worked on by leading  different workshops such as “#Rewind”, “Greenhouse: The Dream”, “Columbus GIN Evolution” and “At GIN, we are all Guajira”.

“GIN conference is all about students showing their work  so they can share it with others to inspire them to do the same, is all based on student work, effort and ideas,” Jose Vega, GIN coordinator, said.

“#Rewind” workshop had the objective to create social awareness regarding paper and plastic usage by creating simple solutions to problems that may start affecting future societies.

“Our workshop was focused on the essential question, what action can you take to reduce paper and plastic usage at your school to improve environmental health?, we direct our attention to the 3 R’s: reuse,reduce,recycle and the reduction of plastic usage,” Paloma Urrea, 9th grader, said.

Safe, green, crop markets is what “Greenhouse:The Dream” is all about by educating students and teachers about organic crops and the process it takes to grow healthy products.

“One of our major problems is the lack of identity and the fact that students don’t know what the greenhouse is, but we have accomplished to raise awareness by selling the crops we grow,” Maria Cuartas,10th grader, said.

GIN’s impact has increased the school’s community helping over 1,500 Columbus School community members to date, by creating projects that innovate the school into being a more eco friendly place.

“There’s no right answer on how a school can develop a sustainable GIN program, sustainability is a big challenge in GIN because if a project starts and then stops it means it was not sustainable, so the big question is how to make them sustainable?,” Vega said.

Having successfully served 1,060 Wayuú natives from Mescalito and El Milagro communities to date, “At GIN, We are all Guajira” creates a sustainable water system that combats their actual water crisis.

“We had a variety of fundraising activities before the trip,which helped with understanding what their problem was and how we could intervene was our main goal. It wasn’t easy, but at the end our goal was reached making a lot of people happy to have clean drinkable water,” Isabella Gomez, 8th grader, said.