By the Colegio Ayalde MUN Club
Colegio Ayalde is located near Bilbao in the Basque Country, Spain. The students have been participating in MUN conferences since 2014 and organised their first conference, MUN Bilbao, in January 2017. The MUN activity here at Ayalde has grown from an original five students to over seventy participating now.
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It all started about two months ago, when our teacher talked to us about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). She challenged us to come up with a cooperative way to help on the achievement of these targets.
Extremely good projects were raised from the brainstorming we made the next day. After meticulously evaluating the pros and cons of each idea, we all agreed that a school-wide collection of different products would be the most effective idea. This collection would undoubtedly be a helpful method to help achieving the 1st Goal, “End Poverty”.
The UN has published different ways in which this target could be reached. Most of them had to do with policies and politics, but some others – such as distributing products among people in need – was manageable for us, an enthusiastic group of teenagers.
No sooner said than done, we got to the job in hand and started giving speeches about the project around the school. In order to make our presentations understandable for all, we had to adapt them to the students’ age. We divided into pairs and explained to the whole school what the SDGs were and how we were going to help the UN. We were glad to see that all the students were enthusiastic about it!
The idea was to assign each grade with a different product. The smallest ones, for example, had to bring all types of books or toys. Girls aged 9 to 12 were asked to collects clothes, while the oldest students brought in school material. In the end, we got to fill 5 vans, and took the goods to Cáritas (a Spanish organization who distributes these among needy families).
All in all, this project has made us feel useful and even necessary for the achievement of the Goals. We also learnt a lot about managing big projects, which is an undeniably essential life-skill. We’re very thankful to our teachers and the other students, who gave their all to make the most of our project. We are all now eager to launch a brand new campaign for the SDGs!