Anti-Plastic Awareness Campaign

Give Hands Together for Change is an officially registered Non-Governmental Organisation (N.G.O.). This non-profit organisation had organised many campaigns for the benefit of the society. Among them was Anti-Plastic Awareness Campaign (A.P.A.C) which was initiated around a year ago. Since then this campaign had successfully been organised in four different schools.
This campaign was all about making school children aware about plastic, its harms and the things to be done to avoid the harms. Since plastics are one of the main causes of environmental degradation, we wanted to inspire the children not to use it. We tried our best to implant the message, "Say no to plastic" in the minds of growing children by the use of multimedia presentations and interactive videos.
We also tried to make the participants of our program utilize their knowledge regarding plastics practically. We did this by organising a rally to aware the local residents or by organising an essay or drawing competition with a theme based on plastic. We then declared the school where we organised the program as a "plastic bags restricted area".
This program had a tremendous effect on the children making them feel responsible towards the environment. However, the pace of this program was very slow; we could perform only four programs in a year. Since, we were students and we had to collect all the expenses from our pocket money, we couldn’t launch this program in many schools as it should had been. 





Programs conducted as Anti Plastic Awareness Campaign
New English School, Maijubahal 



This was the first phase of our campaign. We made a well-documented proposal describing our program’s every aspect and presented it to the principal of the school. After completing some written formalities, we were now ready to conduct the program in the school. We then made a multimedia presentation in order to increase the efficiency of our program. Thinking that presentation targets only a little number of people, we added a 10 minutes rally in order to aware the local resident about plastic. Similarly, we also declared the school as a plastic-free zone. In this way, the first program of our first campaign was conducted successfully.
Basantapur in Holi-2069
We then planned our second phase of APAC in Basantapur, Kathmandu. The planned day was the day of ‘Holi’, a great festival of Nepal, as many people use plastic packets to fill water and throw at each other as a part of celebration. Because of this, plenty of plastic packets get accumulated in the street and it makes the surrounding dirty. So in order to discourage the people to use the plastic packets, we began creating awareness among the large mobile audience by reciting catchy slogans and distributing the pamphlets we had previously prepared. 



This program introduced us to many people who were trying to donate something to the society and nation as a whole, by means of similar procedures we were carrying out. This program was also able to spread awareness among many people, transforming our simple idea to a successful event. 
 Sunshine English Boarding School, New Baneshwor 



In the same way, we also launched our APAC in Sunshine English Boarding School, New Baneshwor. The program was a bit different than our first program in New English School. This session of APAC included a Power Point presentation instead of video presentation in order to make the students understand what we intended to say. Furthermore, instead of a rally there was an art competition with a theme, ‘effects of plastic in the environment’. The art competition was a great idea as we could engage students in something related to plastic and environment. This was going to make the students understand the adverse effects of plastic in an artistic way.
Arunodaya Academy, Swayambhu 



The most recent phase of our campaign was organised in Arunodaya Academy which is located in Swayambhu. This program was similar to other phases of the campaign. However, we introduced an essay writing competition instead of what we had organised in our previous campaign. The idea of essay writing competition was brilliant because we could correctly test how much the students had understood from our presentation. Later when we read the essays of the students, we were pretty convinced that they then knew a lot more than they knew prior to our presentation. This not only gave us the understanding of how much a student gets to learn from our campaign but also how well had we presented them the facts and figures. 
Current State of Anti-Plastic Awareness Campaign
This is an ongoing campaign of our organisation. This campaign has been paused right now due to our focus in other programs. We had to limit the reach of this program due to lack of economic and other resources. We will be continuing this program in the future; we are planning to organise other phases of this program outside the valley and increase the reach to increase the overall efficiency of the program.

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