What could the air smell like?

"...and the air smelled like strawberries all the time."

I'm sitting here feeling an overwhelm of love, grief, energy and sadness as I watch some of the beautiful videos made a group of 10 year old girls as part of a project with GDST (The Girls'​ Day School Trust) to support climate action and empowerment in schools.

Over the course of the project, we've taken over 800+ girls through a journey (which we use in all of our programmes at ThoughtBox Education) from immersing & understanding to exploring perspectives & possibilities to feeling empowered; a journey to better understand and respond collaboratively to the challenges and opportunities of our time.

Kids get it so deeply, and the messages coming from these behaviour-change videos are so wise and so simple. They see the connections and can join the dots to point out cause and effect. They can cut through the nonsense getting in the way of 'doing something' and cut straight to the chase with powerful clarity; something that we really need right now.

These videos - each of them so different and unique - show a mixture of humility, of care, of urgency and of community to respond to the challenges and opportunities of our time. From addressing fast fashion and food-waste, to consumerism and single-use plastics, the underlying messages are the same:

🍓 We need to act now

🍓 It begins with changing our mindset and our behaviours

🍓 There's so much we can do

🍓 Let's do it together

The 'strawberry song' (as I'll remember it) in particular, says it all: “We got down on our knees and worshipped the trees and saved all the bees. And the air smelled like strawberries all the time."

What our children need is for us to step up now. For us to show acts of humility and grace; of learning and unlearning; of 'doing something' and of care. As reports of growing levels of #ecoanxiety caused by a sense of moral failure from inaction by 'the grown ups' continue, we have a duty of care to act, and to share stories of what is possible and what is happening (a great article published yesterday from Cassy Polimeni advocates for the same).

So, on behalf of these ten year olds, I ask you what are you doing to help the air smell more like strawberries?🍓

#gratitude #empowerment #humility #community #climateaction