Help Make an Island Plastic Free

Time flies when you're having fun! It’s been one year since our first project report, so we thought we’d give you a little summary of our work to date.

• We planned to work with 240 students at two schools. The schools were a little smaller than we anticipated so we’ve expanded to three schools. 
• All three schools participated in our Design Competition.
• We’ve donated 19 bottles to teachers and school staff and over 100 booklets to students.
• Two workshops have been held with school staff and two one-on-one mentoring sessions with teachers.
• Two schools have returned their booklets to us and these have been marked by our Environmental Educator.
• Along with the Coral Triangle Center, Marine Megafauna Foundation and Bali Hai, we held a fantastic event for girls across the island for Earth Day. It happened to coincide with Hari Kartini, a national day to celebrate women and girls education, which is why only girls were invited.
• Our team has visited the schools three times – in April, June and September. We’re now planning our trip to Lembongan to hold a ceremony for each school and to donate bottles to the 122 students who have completed the lessons.

This project is the first time we've worked with schools outside of Bali and Australia, and we've learned some key lessons:

• Technology was an unexpected but important part of working with schools that are on a different island. Providing additional support to teachers is crucial, for example, explaining how to reduce file sizes to for email attachments when sending lesson reports.
• Travel plays a big role in our ability to support the schools the way we would like to. Partnerships with organisations and businesses on the island help us to stay connected to Lembongan, and to the schools, even when we can’t physically be there.

In December, our friends at the Marine Megafauna Foundation (who are based in Lembongan) popped over to SDN 3 Lembongan and gave a fun presentation to the Grade Five students. The MMF team spoke to the class about how lucky they are to live in a place with some of the best parts of the ocean anywhere in the world. They talked about some of the different marine animals found around Lembongan, and played games to identify their favourite animals. The most popular were turtles, dolphins, manta rays and octopuses.

Next time you hear from us, we will have held a celebration at the schools and donated bottles to the fantastic students in our program - all made possible because of you!