July Updates from Youth In Action - Sprouts for the Future

Before hands get in the soil and feet in the clay, as part of the Youth in Action local projects, the Community of Practice zoomed out to understand the impacts they want the project to make both individually and collectively. This means that before doing any local implementation, they want to first understand their evaluation metrics and then baseline measurements. They paused to reflect on what the desired ecological, community, and educational results would be – and how these can be measured.

The most tangible impacts can be the increased plant species, the higher percentage of locally sourced food, the reduction of harmful materials in the buildings, and the decreased waste generated. They will also keep track of how many people are engaged, both directly in bringing the projects to life, as well as indirectly as the wider community benefits from them. A third level of engagement can be tracked through how much media exposure the projects generate. When the local news shares stories about the initiative, more people gain inspiration. When the local municipalities agree to meet with the educators and possibly direct resources towards them, this can have a huge long-term positive impact. They want to measure the tangible impacts as well as the intangible ones, the quantitative and qualitative. So they will also integrate ways to measure how the children benefit from the “learning by doing” approach as well as the motivation of educators when new resources are added to their support.

Overall, regenerative educators found value in stepping back before stepping forward. At the moment before some intense action, our partners will take a moment to assess where they started, as a snapshot to come back to in a few months’ time when the spaces and communities have been transformed.

They each made short videos of the ‘before’ and look forward to adding the images of the completed dream. In the image below you can see a barren field will transform into a vibrant event space. Some skeleton framing will add natural material walls to become a complete classroom, a monospecies acreage will allow a biodiverse forest to emerge, a lonely cardboard box for paper on the stairwell which will welcome a new waste management system, and a square foot plot will make way for an all-encompassing veggie garden.

Stay tuned for their transformation!