Education Brazil Project #17660

Young EcoLeaders of the Brazilian Rainforest

by Iracambi

Project Report | Dec 16, 2020
Watch out, world! Environmental Leaders are here!

By Yasmin | Course Coordinator

Environmental Leadership Course

Olá dear donors!

How are you doing in these crazy last weeks of this crazy year? It’s certainly been a wild ride, but we’re still here, and we absolutely wouldn’t be if it wasn’t for our wonderful supporters and donors from around the world! So we want to send a great big thank you to all of you.

We couldn’t do it without you.

And now we want to introduce you to our first cohort of Environmental Leaders.

First a confession. They course was designed for youth:16-29. But when we advertised it on social media we forgot to include that fact, so, when we subsequently introduced the age range, we had incredibly strong pushback from potential participants saying that we should include young people of all ages. And we did!

We had students from four of the five regions of Brazil, ages ranging from 18 - 60 something. Teachers were a mixture of university professors, Iracambi staff and practitioners. We met on Google Meet and posted lots of activities in the Google Classroom. Course modules were:

Introduction to Iracambi
Climate change and what we can do about it
Covid and its effects on the environment
Soils and degradation
Culture, social movements and community leaders
Public policy and popular participation
Forests and water
Closing session, group feedback and next steps.

The course was a huge success and there's already demand for a followup course, a repeat of the first course, and also a course in English!.

We were really pumped by the enthusiastic reaction from the students, and particularly happy to learn from one of the younger students that her first introduction to rainforest science had been as a member of the Young EcoLeaders program!

Next year we're hoping to have the schoolkids back AND continue with online courses - how exciting is that?

In the meantime, so many thanks for your support. It's been a challenging year, but thanks to you, we're still here!

Blessings, take care, and rainforest love from

Yasmin and the Iracambi team

PS. Stop press! One of our Environmental Leaders just took a four hour bus ride to join us at Iracambi and help with the tree planting!

Homework

Some of the participants (not all had cameras!)

Links:

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Dec 1, 2020
Giving Tuesday and the EcoLeaders

By The Iracambi Team | Rainforest Education champions

Giving Tuesday EcoLeader

Olá, dear donors!

Today’s the day! It’s Giving Tuesday! How exciting is that? We all finally get the chance to give back!

Reach out to someone - even if it's virtually or on the phone. Donate supplies to someone in need. Say a big thank you to a frontline worker, give someone a surprise gift. Support a cause you believe in. Donate to your favorite non profit. Whatever you do to make the world a little brighter, today's the day!

A quick reminder that Giving Tuesday starts today, December 1^st at 00.00.00 ET and runs through 23:59:59 ET on December 1^st. So wherever we are in the world, we’ll all be able to make our donations during daylight hours.

And here's an amazing bonus. This year, GlobalGiving has an incentive fund of ONE MILLION DOLLARS to be divided proportionately among all GlobalGiving partners, according to the amount they raise. So each organization will get a share of the pot, and the money will be allocated at the end of the day. (Which means that we don’t have to worry about matching funds running out before some of us in far flung corners of the world are even out of bed.)

Last year Iracambi raised $11,617 on Giving Tuesday and this year we’re aiming to do even better. So please, if you can, donate to this project and help us Save more Forests and Change more Lives! And please post on your social media and alert all colleagues, friends and family and let’s see if we can make this that best Giving Tuesday ever, OK?

We can’t tell you how grateful we are for your support – this has been a challenging year for us all. Here at Iracambi we had to close the Center to our students, with the result that our income was reduced by almost one third. In fact, if it hadn't been for you, our generous donors, we might have had to close our doors. So we're giving thanks for you all!

Sending lots of rainforest love and a big virtual hug from

The Iracambi team

PS Hot off the press: we started our online environmental leadership course last week and it's turning out to be such a success that we're already planning to hold more courses and reach more people. We'll tell you all about it in our next letter.

Links:

Learn all about Giving Tuesday!

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Nov 17, 2020
Let's learn about living and non-living elements!

By Marina, Yasmin and the Iracambi team | Iracambi educators

Living or non-living?

Hello, dear donors!

I hope you continue safe and well? Please take care of yourselves – the world needs good people!

And before we start, here's a headsup. It's just two weeks to Giving Tuesday and this year GlobalGiving has a million dollars in matching funds to stretch your donation! So please alert your friends, colleagues and rich uncles to donate to Iracambi and let's make this the best Giving Tuesday ever, OK?

And now for the inside scoop on what's been happening in environmental education at Iracambi since we last wrote. Exciting news - today is the day we launch our online environmental leadership course, hooray, hooray! We'll tell you more about it in our next letter. (Just a quick hint, we have seventy people signed up, and this week we’ll be giving an introduction to Iracambi, talking a little bit about our work in the rainforest, and then tackling one of the big elephants in the room: climate change!)

But before we report back on that, we wanted to give you a quick look at another of the online science classes that we've been sending out to local schoolkids during this time of lockdown. And the feedback has been super positive.

This one is about Ecosystems. See how you get on with it!

We start by explaining about the ecosystem. It consists of living and non-living elements, right? So, how do we define living organisms? (We'll introduce the terms biotic and abiotic later on.)

* They have a life cycle – they are born and they die.

* They interact and collaborate among themselves. (Yuval Harari, author of Homo Sapiens, points out that this is one of the characteristics that has enabled humans to survive.)

* And lastly, they depend not only on other living organisms, but also on non-living elements.

And then we gave examples of living organisms: humans, horses, sloths, armadillos, chickens, as well as plants: trees, bananas, and palm trees.

After that, we talked about non-living elements and explained the differences.

They don’t have a life cycle, they don’t interact and collaborate among themselves, and they exist independently. Examples we gave are water, air, rocks and soil. We showed some pictures and asked the children to divide them up into living organisms and non-living elements. And then we asked if they knew that we live in the Atlantic Rainforest – one of the richest ecosystems in the world! We asked them to color in the living organisms and mark an X against the non-living elements in the picture.

It was a fun lesson, and the kids really enjoyed it! And in our next letter we'll report back on our online course, OK?

In the meantime please stay safe, and thank you for supporting us as we support the EcoLeaders who will be the future guardians of the planet!

With love from Marina, Yasmin and the Iracambi team

What makes up an ecosystem?

is this one living or non-living?

Links:

Iracambi website

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