From January to October, around 30 women from various villages in Bantul have participated in a Climate Change Awareness Workshop hosted by PPMK and kindly funded by the Australian Volunteers Program (AVP). We selected the participants amongst our existing microcredit clients, choosing women who can maximize the use of skillsets obtained during the workshops. Ultimately, half of the participants were farmers using traditional agricultural techniques who we will introduce to organic farming, and the other half were women running their households and having various types of businesses such as warungs (small shops) using waste management skills.
During the workshop series, the women learned, for example, about soil health, how to properly recycle their household waste. The women learned how to sort between organic and non-organic waste and how to compost it to use it for their own garden. Also, they learned that they can sell non-organic waste to a recycling company, opening up a new business opportunity. Furthermore, the participants had the opportunity to learn about climate change and its global causes and effects. More importantly, we discovered pathways to how every single one of us can contribute to mitigating the impact of climate change in our daily activities and make our world a little bit better.
The last session was dedicated to evaluating the success of the climate change awareness workshop series. Together we reactivated our knowledge through a quiz and celebrated our achievements by handing out prizes. Furthermore, we crowned the individual and group winners of our organic garden competition.
Over lunch, the participants had the opportunity to spread the word about climate change to their family members, who were also invited to take part and enjoy the community organic garden at PPMK. Lastly, we handed out multiple climate change awareness stickers to the participants which they could give to neighbors and community members. The stickers will hopefully serve as a constant reminder to stop global warming!
Share this