We are delighted to share a blog written by student, Dexter Limpenny, from The English School Kuwait who is part of a team delivering a Global Goals project for the 2019-20 Global Goals Competition.
Their project is among over 957 social action projects currently running as part of the GSL movement and we are excited to be supporting them to design and lead positive social change in their community.
We have all really enjoyed working without a teacher and having our own responsibilities.
The aim of this project is to inspire the population of Kuwait to become fitter and healthier. Kuwait’s population has a high prevalence of diabetes. Indeed, it is ranked 9th overall in the world due to the number of diabetes cases and related deaths. We want to change this and encourage people to be more active! We will be posting short clips on the school twitter account of us doing different exercises. Hopefully many people will see these videos and become inspired to burn off some quick calories.
As we live in a country where going out for a run or cycle can be difficult because of the busy roads and hot weather, we think these videos will make it easy for people to work out at their home. Kuwait (the country we live in) also has one of the highest overweight rates in the world at 70%. The videos could have a massive impact all across Kuwait, because the school account will be available to hundreds of people. We think the videos will be quite fun and enjoyed by many children as we have some interesting drills to get fit.
So far we have made a slideshow presentation about what we want to do to make a difference in the mental health area, in the slideshow we have made lots of ideas about how we want to conquer the unhealthy part of Kuwait (e.g. we want to do activities such as strength and cardio activities).
The Next Chapter
Our next step is to present our idea to our leadership team of our school and ask them if this extracurricular activity is going to be able to work. If they say we are able to do it then we will set an example that both children and parents from TES and even NES or KES, if they are willing to come. Then we will also make videos outside of school and post them on social media (e.g. Twitter, instagram). To sustain interest we will have to maintain the update the content on social media.
I would recommend people to get involved in a project similar to this.
The 2019-20 GSL Global Goals Competition is now open and runs until June 2020. If you belong to one of the 700+ teams of students currently delivering a social action project as part of the competition we would love to hear from you and feature your blog and project photos on our website to inspire others.