Youth and Civic Engagement
The youth are at a crossroads, as they are extremely vulnerable to the complex challenges of environmental degradation, climate change, and growing economic inequality. The climate crisis has triggered the attention of young people and common citizens but their actions need to be channelised in the right direction as they are highly disconnected from grassroots realities. The Youth and Civic Engagement programme focuses on education and narrative building among youth and citizens through experiential learning platforms and effective communication of nuanced perspectives.
Experiential learning tours in Chennai.
We organise curated livelihood and wetland tours in Chennai for youth. Livelihood tours involve visits to nature-based livelihood units, such as organic farms, and focus on their environmental and socio-economic aspects, as well as conscious consumerism. Wetland tours will involve visits to various water bodies within a particular watershed, focusing on eco-social, cultural, and historical aspects.
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Place based Sessions and learning modules.
We organise sessions for school and college students, as well as the public, on various topics related to livelihood, urban ecology, and climate change. We have already developed learning sessions, such as 'Know Your Food', 'Chennai Bluescape', 'Climate Change - Localised Perspective', 'Biodiversity and Natural History', and 'Reimagining Public Spaces', among others. We are also planning to pilot place-based education modules in schools (whole academic year) - Namma Chennai: Beyond Classrooms and Community-based Education of Wetlands, Coast and Climate Change, with community design action exhibition and community museum as one of the outputs, respectively.
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Rethinking Development Youth camp.
Rethinking Development - Development, Distress and Direction is an experiential learning module focused on interrogating the current model of development and reimaging our collective futures - a new perspective to climate action. It includes interactive sessions, group activities and exposure visits.
Aram Thinai Podcast.
Aram Thinai Podcast is a Tamil podcast focusing on climate change from the lens of common people and nature-dependent communities. We share grassroots stories of resilience, inspiration, and endurance along with our nuanced perspectives in a conversation mode through the podcast.
Articles, Photo essays and Illustrations.
We record people’s lived experiences and knowledge (especially nature-dependent communities), localised climate resilience and the disproportional impacts of climate change. It will be effectively communicated through articles, photo essays, Illustrations, art works, exhibitions etc
