Raquel Couhtino (ELP 2019) | Senior Social Environmental Project Analyst, Ecofuturo Institute, Brazil

One of the biggest challenges that we face in developing countries is how to engage people to be concerned about environmental issues. This even happens in Brazil, where I’m from. Just because we have Amazonia and many protected areas does not mean that the entire population is concerned about the environment. That’s a gradual construction!

And it’s not only about concern, it’s also about what we can do to live in a better place. Nature is part of our life, and it does not matter if you live in a city or on a farm.

Thinking about that, Ecofuturo Institute (the NGO that I work for) leads a program in two Brazilian cities, Malacacheta (state of Minas Gerais) and Prado (state of Bahia), in which the main goal is to build awareness and care for nature.

We offer an environmental education course for teachers of public schools, based in the Brazilian National Policy of Environmental Education. During the course, we encourage teachers to create and develop their own projects to change the reality they live in. And it starts in their schools.

They develop these projects with our support and assistance throughout the year, and they do it with the help of their students. They have already performed seedling nursery, vegetable gardens, and school committees to discuss sustainable actions.

By the end of the year, in each of those two cities, a “pedagogical fair” takes place, where teachers present how their social-environmental projects have developed. This fair also works as a place for them to celebrate and share experiences and knowledge. It’s amazing to see all the work they have done and how they’ve engaged school communities to develop the projects.

More than 150 teachers have participated in the program, developing more than 20 social-environmental educational projects in their schools. Having the opportunity to coordinate this program is, for me, one of the most pleasurable parts of my job. It’s a way to collaborate to build social-environmental awareness in my country and also to promote collective mobilization actions that contribute to the transformation that we, environmentalists, believe in.