GDST: We Are One

“I’m just one person - how can I make a difference?” said 20,000 children…

Small shifts in mindset can inspire monumental changes in us all

Alice, Jacinder and Anita are busy plotting. They’ve been working together for the past few months on a campaign to create sustainable behaviour change in schools - and have found themselves suddenly fascinated by wolves.

“Did you know that wolves changed an entire eco-system in Yellowstone National Park?!” exclaimed one of the three Y6 girls at a recent ThoughtBox mentoring session. “Just imagine what could happen if we could help create healthy changes like that…”

When girls lead with dreams, real change soon follows

It is this sort of blue-sky, big-picture thinking that is so infectious in ten-year-old girls. They are some of the most powerful changemakers out there - filled with boundless imagination, a huge zest for change and a willingness to roll up their sleeves and get active.

For the past year, ThoughtBox has been partnering with the Girls Day School Trust (GDST) to co-create the We Are One project - a sustainability campaign for Y6 girls to create long-lasting behaviour change in their school communities. The project was inspired by the idea that - as a family of schools - the Trust is stronger together and can act as a united community to bring about climate action.

Global movements can begin in the quiet corners of any classroom…

This project is all about ‘being the change’. After the initial ‘training event’ the girls spend time learning and sharing their thoughts and feelings about climate change, whilst connecting with stories of changemakers from around the world. They then work for several months to develop a short behaviour-change video and school-wide campaign for change, mentored by the ThoughtBox team to coach, guide and support the project along the journey.

This age group get it so deeply, and the messages coming from their behaviour-change videos are so wise yet so simple. They see the connections and soon join the dots to help point out cause and effect. They cut through the nonsense getting in the way of 'doing something' and get straight to the point with powerful clarity; something that we really need in our world right now.

When voices unite, the future begins to look so much brighter

The campaign videos - each of them beautifully unique - show a mixture of humility, care, urgency and most importantly community; all coming together to face the world and make a healthier future. From addressing fast fashion and food-waste, to consumerism and single-use plastics, the underlying messages that the pupil campaigns support are almost always the same:

  • We need to act now

  • It begins with changing our mindset and our behaviours

  • There's so much we can do. Let's do it together

The girls are quick to understand that changing hearts and minds doesn’t happen by making people feel guilty. It’s all about sharing stories of hope – stories of what is possible and what is already happening, whilst offering ways for everyone to take part and be an active changemaker.

Bringing the imagination into the campaigns has proved hugely successful in offering a way for people to visualise the future we’re all working to co-create. The chorus in one of the campaign songs made by some of last year’s girls pretty much says it all: “We got down on our knees and worshipped the trees and saved all the bees. And the air smelled like strawberries all the time."

Whilst the campaign is localised in the girls’ own school community, the project is collective across all 25 UK schools, and the pupils regularly come together across the year to share, learn and explore. From ThoughtBox training sessions to storytelling with environmental activist Cindy Forde; to rewilding on Wimbledon Common to learning to act with ThoughtBox’s ‘Dare to Care’ workshop, the ‘larger us’ is a consistent part of the programme – helping appreciate that when it comes to sustainable practice, we’re in this together. Because together is how we change the world.