Goals

Problem statement:

The village of Sanavardo is home to 1000 people who take pride in its beautiful natural setting and fertile land including the legendary Kindzmarauli micro-climate. With this setting, people should make caring for the environment their first priority.

Unfortunately, the reality is quite the opposite. There are no trash bins in the village and the removal vehicle comes only a week. Even worse, there is very low awareness of environmental issues. The majority of people, including kids and the elderly, throw the garbage directly in the street. Most often you would see the plastic bags and packaging in the streets or the open canals.

Additionally, household waste management could also be improved. Almost nobody separates waste, and most people simply through their trash in a hole and burn it. This is an ecological disaster. We believe it is urgent to change local attitudes towards the environment.

Proposed Solution:

Our initiative is to create an environmental club with 30 teenagers for a series of meetings in a non-formal setting to increase education.

Each meeting will consist of 2 parts:

First, we will do an activity from the guidebook COMPASS, which argues a healthy environment is a basic human right and offers several influential simulation games for to deepen knowledge about the topic and changing attitudes. Some meetings will perform related non-COMPASS activities.

Second, there will be a movie screening and discussion. We will show diversity of documentaries to inspire our youth and equip them with the knowledge and skills to care for their environment.

At the screenings, we will discuss together how to employ what we learned to our village and how to share our education with our community. Additionally, we will regularly collect garbage in the streets, collect, separate, and composite it. During these efforts, we will try to engage the wider public.

At the end of the project, we will divide into small groups that will initiate different activities in the village to share what they learned with others and to inspire others to change their daily habits.

Sustainability:

We will continue the project in other villages of Kvareli municipality, one by one. In case our organizational capacity will allow us to unite several villages and make bigger groups, we will try to have meetings up to 50 people. With the equipment like a projector and chairs, we repeat this project several times because there are no other big costs.

Equal gender opportunity:

We will select an equal number of girls and boys for the project from the very beginning. During the Compass activities we will follow all the instruction to provide safe and comfortable environment for both genders to be active and get involved fully with their opinions and initiatives.