Resilience can be understood as “the ability to withstand threats or shocks, or the ability to adapt to new livelihood options, in ways that preserve integrity and that do not deepen vulnerability”. Through the implementation of the Education project FADV works to strengthen resilience of children and young people focusing on climate change.
Climate change is global in its nature, but it has different effects at local level. Hence, the issue of Climate Change has been addressed by FADV in order to create awareness towards protective environment around the children.
From 2019 onwards FADV has started a campaign named “Tree-Generation” under the Education projects in West Bengal and Assam. This campaign is about planting saplings by children around their household, school or any open premises in their village. Till date more than 300 children have planted around 500 saplings in their villages and many of them has prepared kitchen garden. They gave grown eggplant, potatoes, tomatoes, leafy vegetables and so on. The parents proudly claim that the vegetables grown by their children are used in cooking in their households.
Under this campaign the children also held a number of community awareness sessions through door to door visit and visiting local shops to request people to reduce the use of plastic. In addition to this they held street plays and made wall paintings explaining the benefits of having more trees around us, reduce the misuse of water and harmful effects of plastic. The peer group members under each of the learning centres under FADV Education Projects run cleaning drive around the centres, thus setting examples for the elders in their community to keep environment clean.
The Tree-Generation Campaign will be continued in 2020 and years to come by the children, supported by their teachers and family members.