Ryan Ba­choo

Lead Ed­i­tor – News­gath­er­ing

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

IAMove­ment held its sec­ond Cli­mate Cham­pi­on Day ded­i­cat­ed to nur­tur­ing the next gen­er­a­tion of lead­ers and change-mak­ers by pro­vid­ing a fo­rum where teenagers learned, en­gaged, and took ac­tion on cli­mate-re­lat­ed is­sues.

The event was tai­lored to per­sons be­tween the ages of 15-18 years of age, show­cas­ing a dy­nam­ic ar­ray of en­gag­ing in­ter­ac­tive in­door ed­u­ca­tion­al ses­sions on en­vi­ron­men­tal con­ser­va­tion and sus­tain­abil­i­ty to hands-on out­door ex­pe­ri­ences fo­cus­ing on prac­ti­cal cli­mate so­lu­tions, par­tic­i­pants were both in­formed and in­spired to be­come cat­a­lysts for change in their com­mu­ni­ties.

The Project Man­ag­er, Kath­leen Van Oost­erzee-Bona, kicked off the day with an en­gag­ing pre­sen­ta­tion cen­tred around “Cli­mate Change.” Her fo­cus en­com­passed strate­gies for both adapt­ing to and mit­i­gat­ing the ef­fects of this glob­al is­sue. At­ten­dees delved in­to un­der­stand­ing the con­cepts of “cli­mate change,” “adap­ta­tion,” and “mit­i­ga­tion” through fun ac­tiv­i­ties like cha­rades and pop quizzes, re­in­forc­ing these terms ef­fec­tive­ly. Mak­ing the ses­sion high­ly in­ter­ac­tive, Kath­leen re­ward­ed ac­tive­ly en­gaged par­tic­i­pants with small to­kens.

Saman­tha Khan took the lead of the sec­ond work­shop, de­liv­er­ing an en­light­en­ing ses­sion on “be­com­ing a Cli­mate Cham­pi­on”. Her pre­sen­ta­tion show­cased var­i­ous av­enues through which at­ten­dees and young per­sons could ac­tive­ly con­tribute to cli­mate caus­es.

From “Close the Loop Caribbean”, Say­eed Ali, As­sis­tant Project Co­or­di­na­tor, fa­cil­i­tat­ed the last in­door work­shop which fo­cused on the con­cept of “Cir­cu­lar Econ­o­my”. He adept­ly in­tro­duced par­tic­i­pants to cir­cu­lar eco­nom­ic mod­els aimed at min­i­miz­ing the vol­ume of waste di­rect­ed to lo­cal land­fills. De­spite be­ing one of the more chal­leng­ing top­ics at the event, Say­eed elu­ci­dat­ed the sub­ject us­ing fa­mil­iar, lo­cal­ly rel­e­vant ex­am­ples, mak­ing it more ac­ces­si­ble and re­lat­able for the at­ten­dees.