Young EcoLeaders of the Brazilian Rainforest

Dear wonderful donors, 

While politicians, leaders, and representatives of every nation and every sector of society are gathered in Glasgow for COP 26, we have been once again gathering our own groups of environmental leaders online to come together, define and seek solutions to pressing environmental problems in their own communities, and act on them.  And we´re happy to be able to bring you another report from the field, letting you know how we are putting your donations to work!

As you will know if you have been following our letters, we've been mobilizing people of all ages from across Brazil, to reflect on what it is to be an environmental leader, and to collaborate on acts of leadership large and small, reporting back, encouraging one another, and recruiting other potential leaders.

We've just finished our fifth course, and each time we learn something new. Our main takeaway is that there's a hunger among environmentalists for finding their tribe, rolling up sleeves, and getting to work. And in this past course there were two main themes that attracted the most attention and action.

The first is some variation on creating community gardens - often located on school grounds - and encouraging parents, children and community members to come together and get their hands into the dirt. There are a variety of activities in connection with this, ranging from collecting food waste from restaurants and coffee bars to make compost, to setting up composting centers, growing and sharing fresh vegetables with vulnerable communities, raising awareness of environmental issues, and investigating the potential of creating additional income streams for those who are interested.

In parallel, one of the other groups completed a mapping exercise of local smallholder farms, held meetings with the farm women, persuaded the local authorities to set up a famers´ market and also commit to buying vegetables for school meals from the local farmers´ group. 

Taken together, these activities are helping farm families to find new markets, providing healthy fresh food to schools  - often located in food "deserts" with little or no access to fresh vegetables, encouraging recycling and composting, and mobilizing neighborhood communities to work together and have fun.

One of the students, Italo, was so excited about his composting project that he couldn´t help talking about it. "I absolutely loved the course,"  he said, "and the best thing was to meet so many interesting people, and to give ourselves time and space to stop and reflect about what we could do together. I got so interested that I started looking into agroecology, and it´s opened up a whole new world for me. My group is figuring out how we can maybe set up neighborhood cooperatives, and the course may be over, but we´re not stopping!" 

So thank you so much, dear donors for your support, and, as we are moving towards the end of the school year, we just wanted to give you a headsup that over the next months we´ll be running a series of courses for people who work with young children on how to introduce them to science through the medium of the arts. And we´re hoping and hoping to be able to bring the local schoolchildren back into the forest when the next school year begins in February. So, we have a busy few months ahead. 

And we may not be at COP 26 but we're doing our bit for the environment!

with love and appreciation from Yasmin and the Iracambi team ,