Green Awards

The 2nd Green Award 2010 is back. Invitation to all the schools in Selangor and Federal Territory were sent out last Tuesday during the Award Launching at MBPJ. The brain child of Ms Yasmin Rasyid, Founder of Ecoknights, the Award is held to raise awareness of students on environmental conservation through creative and innovative ideas. This year theme is Let's Recycle with priority given to 3R concept.

Compared to last year competition, this year will see bigger area of coverage which extended from PJ to other parts of Selangor State and Kuala Lumpur. The partners has been expanded from 4 to 7 now. The categories of two Awards remained the same with slight modification of judging. Instead of visiting to the schools at the early stage, visits will only done after the shortlisted 10 schools have began their project according to the submitted proposal.

The beauty of this project, to me is not about another green project for students, but incorporating innovation and creativity with the environmental conservation initiatives. Something that need to be strengthened as many of the environmental awareness projects have been so monotonous and so "boring" least to say. Students today need a lot of encouragement and excitement for them to be interested and got involved in a field. If the marketing of project is not in flavour to their taste and aspiration, for God sake they will not want to participate or even to know. Thereby, innovation in marketing is particularly important in which having a competition encouraging students creativity should be the way forward. Telling them what is good about environment and what should they do is not enough, but getting them to tell us what they know about environment and what they intend to do is much more challenging and could yield better result, I presume.

I am particularly happy with the progress made by Green Award. From a localised PJ initiative, it has been extended to other parts of Klang Valley. This is what I have envisioned for Local Agenda 21 Petaling Jaya, that is to initiate something new, out of the box and to start from small but achievable projects instead of embarking onto something big at the initial stage but unsustainable later. I hope Green Award will become a national project in years to come and I presume this will be another contribution of LA 21 PJ to our nation and sustainable development.

By the way, we are celebrating 10 years of Local Agenda 21 Petaling Jaya as well as in Malaysia.