My Clean School operating in the spirit of United Nations Agenda 21, 25 promoting opportunities for the students to interact with the community and have their say about their environment.
This presentation shows two concepts, My Clean India and My Clean School cooperating to create a more prosperous and beautiful future and create opportunities for leadership.
The unifying theme is Prosperity and Beauty through Community. Creating a better community is what MCI and MCS is about.
My Clean India champions the positives of the community: My Clean School acts as the eyes of My Clean India.
My Clean India promote individuals and groups that make a contribution to improving cleanliness of the environment. It empowers participants as tomorrow's community leaders and works with My Clean School in the spirit of My Clean World.
There are two key aspects to My Clean India. It focuses on community achievements to inspire to create sustainable change. It uses Appreciative Inquiry to show the best features and promotes dreams of what could be.
Appreciative Inquiry looks for the POSITIVE forces that promote inspired and positive change.
Why Appreciative Inquiry? The usual way is to identify problems and then to list the resources (and money) required to fix them. This results in dependency and no responsibility for the problem. When the money dries up, the problem recurs. Appreciative Inquiry shifts from problem solving to building on the positives such as achievements, community strengths and skills. That is why MCI stands for Prosperity and Beauty through Community.
Appreciative Inquiry involves four steps – 4 D’s. Discover what is working & why. Dream what it might look like. Design what action is necessary to make it happen. Destiny the tasks and when to achieve. It is circular and on-going to lead to on going improvement.
My Clean India simply serves to acknowledge people and organisations that are making a difference.
My Clean School acts to observe the community in action providing scholastic insights. My Clean School therefore creates the opportunity for My Clean India to acknowledge those who make a contribution to the environment.
My Clean India is about acknowledging. So what is important is finding sponsors and donors for awards and prizes. Documents and certificates could be sponsored. Joining Clean Up the World could be important. Obviously creating links with the community and that includes the municipal council, associations and relevant groups like the restaurants and hotels. Liaising with the schools networks is obviously very important as the schools represents an impartial observer and can make valuable insights into what needs to be done and creating awareness. Above all, find the champions in the community – those that are already in action and acknowledge them including at the annual cleanup day in September.
There is an opportunity to join Clean Up the World on third weekend of September. It represents an opportunity to acknowledge those who are making a difference in the community and award prizes and awards. The community can also make a statement by cleaning up the environment. It is a day of celebration!
My Clean India and My Clean School working together. Here we look how My Clean School investigates and creates opportunities to work with My Clean India to promote those who make the environment more prosperous and beautiful.
The United Nations has Agenda 21 that promotes the youth for caring for the environment. The youth, with their vigour and independence can look objectively to what can be done. The represent energy while at same time, develop their leadership skills.
My Clean School operates consistent with UN Agenda 21 which encourages the youth to have a say about the environment. MCS enables the schools to be role models for their communities in cleanliness and by interacting with the community, for the students to practice leadership and innovation. Progressive Inquiry is a three step process the students can employ to identify what could be done.
Progressive Inquiry is used by My Clean School and is in three steps. What is liked. What is not liked. What needs to happen. This represents an opportunity for students to work with the community and practice leadership.
Thus My Clean India uses Appreciative Inquiry to discover the community’s achievements. It acknowledges and inspires the community into action. My Clean School on the other hand, uses the three step Progressive Inquiry to find what is, what isnt and what could happen.
Progressive Inquiry is a progressive which uses the scholastic background of the students to explore the community and to identify the opportunities for action and those that are making a difference – the champions.
The schools can interact with the community in many ways. Some opportunities include surveys of issues identified by the community or discovered by the schools and possible solutions for those issues; creating agreements and oaths signed by the community to keep an area clean; awareness building with banners, competitions etc; appointing street marshals to keep streets and regions clean with reporting requirements; promoting the Cleanest Street awards perhaps with the local My Clean India network including finding sponsors; issuing or with MCI supporting the creation of Acknowledgement Certificates for those making a difference to the environment; finding sponsors for litter bins; preparing releases for the media about school surveys, studies and about awards and prizes.
Not all activities have to be about community interaction. Schools can hold competitions for posters, essays or poetry, use and display banners, collect and dispose of rubbish as part of Clean Up the World; and plant trees. All of these can be sponsored and part of the activities of schools is to find sponsors perhaps with the help of My Clean India.
So what can you do? Well create a school’s network by inviting the schools to nominate a representative, normally a teacher with a couple of students. From those representatives create a School’s Committee and elect an area representative. Then the school’s committee can plan for action which includes an annual cleanup day to join Clean Up the World celebration in September.
Key to success is the creation of networks of schools. Schools are approached and invited to nominate a teacher representative and at their discretion, two students. The schools may then be convened to elect an Area Facilitator to represent the school’s network. That Facilitator will convene with the My Clean India network to help with sponsorship and acknowledgement events notably the annual, Clean Up the World day.
The annual Clean Up the World day on the third weekend of September is the day when
The opportunities for action are varied and boundless. It is also fun and empowring.
The tendency is to focus on problems and then to list what is necessary to solve them. This creates dependency and no responsibility. That is why Appreciative Inquiry is being introduced worldwide. Very important is community spirit.
When the community in Nainital took action and celebrated Clean Up Nainital Day in 2007, the town not only became and remained cleaner, it introduced Mission Butterfly - a novel waste management program. Inspired by the name, in Australia, Butterfly Bags knitted from plastic shopping bags.
There are many examples of where little things that happened created big changes. As described in the book, “The Tipping Point”, the cleaning up of the subways in the city of New York led to a dramatic decline in the crime rate and a general uplifting in the quality and the economics of the city. My Clean is promoting a Tipping Point for each country.
My Clean School aims to link nations creating self-confident young people who ARE the change they want to have. To BE it.
The blanket theme for My Clean School and My Clean India is Prosperity and Beauty through Community. It is driven by the schools with My Clean India making a salute to those that make a contribution to creating a prosperous and beautiful environment.
Some years ago a young lady addressed a United Nations Earth Summit conference in Rio de Janeiro. She speaks for the billions of youth today. It is one world!
