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Blue Planet, Green Destiny
Back in 1995, a fresh student group, which is now one of the best associations in TsinghuaUniversity, was born through efforts of a team of environmental enthusiasts, leading a “green” storm on campus for over a decade. Nowadays, Student Green Association (SGA@THU) has grown up to a well-organized group with over 2000 members ever since its foundation and 50 outstanding core members running its “business”.
Our “business” covers a broad range of interests, mainly including environmental protection, energy saving, nature appreciation, and sustainable development. We express our passions by organizing on- and off-campus activities, sharing experiences, developing environmental education, doing surveys and researches, etc. Talented human resources, abundant experience of project management, well-developed relationship network, and excellent achievements on environmental protection have been accumulated within the building process of our “brands”, e.g. “5R in Actions: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Rescue, Reevaluate”, “E-cards: Wishes without Paper”, “Chopsticks of Non-wood: A Chinese Way of Green”, “Non-plastic Fashion: Draw Your Own Style”, “Green Forum: Leading to a Sustainable Future”. Fame, honor and trust brought us more and more partnerships, one of which goes to international cooperation.
International Chapter of Student Green Association (SGA-IC@THU) was hence founded in September, 2008. We, for the first time, paid our attention to the whole world and began to consider “green” in the global scale. The target of International Chapter is to arouse more comprehensive understanding on environmental protection and to promote a clean, healthy and sustainable lifestyle. Our friendships with Harmony Foundation (Canada), Energy Crossroads @ Stanford University (USA), Energy Encarta (Singapore), Golden Bridges (USA), Green Beat (USA), JUCCCE (USA) and ENCSS (USA) set a remarkable start.
The original idea of establishing International Chapter comes from the cooperation with Harmony Foundation on green education. “Green Fund” was built to help primary and middle school students have a better understanding of sustainable development, and the function of this fund is now extended to community education. International Chapter intends to keep up with such international cooperation and develop new partnerships. Our first try was to take part in global conferences. The presentations we made on ENCSS Annual Meeting 2008 and Asian Youth Energy Summit 2008 showed our points of view on what a student group, or rather, a youth NGO can do to live up to a greener future. Our next step was to attract more foreign students to join us so as to bring in different concepts from western countries. “Green Salon” offered a good opportunity of communications between Chinese and foreign students.
Currently, we are committing ourselves to creating a new brand, IYSECC, i.e. International Youth Summit on Energy and Climate Change. This is the first ever global youth conference focusing on energy and climate change issues in China. Aiming to raise awareness internationally about the urgency of addressing climate change, encourage environmental student activism, and promote broader international cooperation, IYSECC presents well the vision of SGA-IC: Blue Planet, Green Destiny.
(ZHANG Lei, President of SGA)
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