In this guest blog post Year 13 student Ishita tells us about her initiative GlobeUplift.
From a young age, I always had the urge to do something for the wider community. As the Secondary Student Coucil “Head of Service & Fundraising” and one of the Head Students last year at Dover Court, I loved conceiving ideas with a greater purpose of inculcating a culture of community service. “We can’t help everyone, but everyone can help someone” by Ronald Reagan, a dictum I pursue. Through all the experiences of initiating and being part of several drives for food, clothes, toiletries, books and toys through DCIS, I realised how these experience truly showcased my desire to instil awareness amongst the youth and encourage them to engage in community service. In addition, I lead the project to honour our school staff from the security, catering and cleaning departments with personalised thank you cards on the occasion of Labour Day for two consecutive years to acknowledge their endless dedication and commitment. Bamboo Straws initiative was another project I led with an objective to replace plastic and paper straws with bamboo straws, to create a low waste sustainability culture around the school. This initiative ingrained my responsibilities towards the environment, making me realise that human and environmental empathy are two sides of the same coin. I had the biggest breakthroughs while managing this project as I realised I was doing it solely for self-fulfilment, rather than for any recognition. I was also glad that these projects were also able to instil a sense of gratitude within our DCIS community. When collective consciousness shifts, great transformations are inevitable.
During lockdown last year, I founded GlobeUplift. It is an initiative that aims to awaken the passion and dedication within youth to address intertwined world issues such as environmental, social and economic issues. We are an empowered team with global citizenship poised to empower others around the world. In the past 10 months, we have accomplished a lot as a team. Some of our major projects include:
Moreover, we foster youth involvement in today's societal issues by conducting live virtual talks and discussions through our two speaker series- Learn@GlobeUplift and Express@GlobeUplift. For Learn@GlobeUplift, we interview influential individuals who have left a mark in society whilst for Express@GlobeUplift we interview young changemakers. A few of our recent events involved Young Doctors who shared their experience battling through the COVID situation in India, COVID Service force in India who are involved in emergency services and an online webinar on Sustainability where we interviewed two wonderful guests. Firstly Kate Yeo, who is the co-founder of the Re-Earth Initiative, an international youth-led organization based on climate justice & initiator of the revolutionary ground-up initiative ‘Bring Your Own Bottle Singapore’ (BYOB) to reduce the wastage of single-use plastic in Singapore. Secondly, Victoria Lim, a Yale graduate in Environment Studies who is the co-founded GREEN, the first sustainability action group at Yale, and EECO, the first environmental education service club at Yale.
GlobeUplift’s core aim is to empower youth which we are pursuing through our Instagram platform. We believe will truly drive change or at least reinforce action and individual reflections. Please check us out on Instagram @globe.uplift!
Ishita
Year 13 student
