Innovative youth climate advocacy
A collaboration with Greenpeace offering secondary school students creative tools to develop resilience to eco-anxiety and take meaningful climate action at their school.
From climate anxiety to agency
Empowering secondary school students to develop resilience to eco-anxiety, The Climate Agency Box offers creative tools and games to support them in crafting meaningful climate actions at their school over eight sessions.
Facilitated through an interactive online platform, an escape room-style box with locks, codes and secret compartments, and a combination of teacher and external artist-led activities, the dynamic learning experience is rooted in Coney’s distinctive practice of Playful Activism.
This programme has been piloted in three secondary schools in 2023-24 and is currently being further developed to reach more schools.
The Game of School
The programme uses game mechanics to introduce how students could affect the change they want to see in the world. Students develop systems thinking to dissect where power is held in both their school and wider society, and develop a creative intervention to engage that power in the change the students want to see. We believe that if you can modify a game system, you can modify any system.
To learn more about how the The Climate Agency Box sessions are constructed, head to our blog here.
Learning outcomes
- Citizenship, both local and global, fostering a sense of responsibility and agency in students to contribute positively to their communities and the world.
- Systems Thinking skills – the ability to recognise the complex structures in place, and understand how to make an impact to influence and change them.
- Multimodal learning
- Creative collaboration and cooperation
- Self-directed project- developing initiative on a creative project of their own design to make impact for the needs of the school as they experience it.
Pilot outcomes
Click the dropdowns to learn about the inspiring outcomes students achieved during the first pilot.
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After learning about Melati and Isabel Wijsen’s work on single use plastics, students at Swanlea School created a systems map of their school’s waste disposal and used it to (1) convince their Deputy Headteacher to lobby local food packaging waste services to transform their disposal model, and (2) encourage sharing their progress with other local schools towards borough-wide collaboration and change.
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Students at Mulberry School for Girls tackled their school’s consumption of fast fashion by creating a swap shop within their school, building a sustainable student-led model for years to come.
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Highlighting waste pollution and wanting the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) to reimagine the waste management at Mulberry Shoreditch, students chose the headteacher as the recipient of their gift and playful activism. Through the delivery of Pandora’s Box, which included a bespoke plastic necklace with a flower inside it to represent the impact of plastic on the natural world, and a USB with a pre-made powerpoint for the SLT, the students sparked change in their school.
