We, Gereltuya and Irene, are two sisters from Mongolia. Green Dot Climate is our pandemic-ignited medium to communicate with the Mongolian youth about public health topics: nutrition, physical activity, mental and environmental health.
Here we share our beliefs around climate actions, why we started Earth Month Club, our recently-finished pilot in Mongolia, and our future plans.
We are self-learned climate activists. We know from experience that making of a climate activist and taking of a climate action have to start from within. That's why we launched our pilot last April, the designated Earth Month, to empower Mongolian teenagers to become climate activists themselves. By the way, you can learn about the current climate situation in Mongolia here on our pilot page.
Teenagers participating the pilot had to educate themselves on climate change, take climate actions everyday, log them into the Team Mongolia on AWorld, and inform their family and friends about climate issues during the month. We supplied them with climate change facts, figures, global and local goals, and actions that they can take; as educational contents, workshop sessions and summarized readings. As a result, a regional ambassadorship was formed all over Mongolia, as requested by our active participants. You can see us on map here.
We saw high engagement present in our teenage community as most of them were worried about this issue for a long time with no way of expressing those feelings of worry within a community or as productive results. They did not know how to begin, but they felt they needed to do something, anything for our planet; just like Green Dot Climate founders ourselves thought the same.
Letting teenagers know of their own power to take control of their climate actions (or inactions) has resulted in more than 30 thousand climate actions within the Earth Month alone. You can see the key numbers here. If we provide more, structured help in their climate journeys, we believe that much bigger impacts are to be made on their accounts.
Will monthly-themed youth-led local clubs be effective climate forces?
Based on the observation of our successful first month in Mongolia, we would like to spread this idea of taking control of one's own actions and turning them into effective and demanding climate actions to teenagers all over the world. Let's be clear, nothing is so sure yet. But we believe that given enough support, they can educate themselves, take climate actions and educate their peers too.
Now our mission is to figure out the better formula for the mentioned support teenagers need in order to become climate activists today and start impacting the future of our planet Earth tomorrow. We are communicating with our 300 pilot participants to activate their classmates in running an Earth Month Club at their schools and they are already at work talking to their school administrations.
If you are interested in starting your own club within your community, or just talking to us about climate change, please leave us a message here.