The Re-Earth Initiative: Bringing Environmental Action into Schools and Communities

Environmental problems are often introduced to students through textbooks: definitions of climate change, diagrams of the carbon cycle, or statistics about pollution. Through the Re-Earth Initiative, we wanted to take these topics beyond the textbook and create opportunities for students to actually discuss, question, and work with them.

Over the past year, our team has brought environmental education directly into schools and communities through classroom lectures, interactive workshops, public outreach campaigns, and student-led environmental activities.

What began as several school visits gradually developed into a broader network involving more than 100 volunteers and thousands of primary and middle school students.

It Started in a Classroom

One of the main parts of Re-Earth Initiative has been visiting schools and delivering environmental education workshops to elementary, middle, and high school students.

Before each visit, our team developed presentation materials and activities around topics including climate change, carbon emissions, renewable energy, water resources, and environmental problems in students' own communities.

But we did not want the sessions to become another class where students simply sat and listened.

We combined short lectures with questions, group discussions, and hands-on activities. When introducing renewable energy, for example, we moved beyond defining solar, wind, and hydropower and asked students to think about where the electricity they use every day comes from and what environmental trade-offs different energy sources may involve. When discussing climate change and carbon emissions, students traced emissions back to familiar activities such as transportation, electricity use, and consumption.

For younger children, we simplified the scientific concepts and used more visual examples like videos and interesting activities. With older students, we introduced more data and encouraged them to compare possible environmental solutions and discuss their limitations.

The workshops therefore changed depending on both the students' ages and the environmental questions we wanted them to explore.

Leading an Environmental Education Workshop in School

What Happens When Students Become Teachers?

- Building a Student-Led Education Network

As we organized more workshops, one practical challenge became clear: if the program depended only on a few members of our team traveling to different schools, its reach would always be limited.

So we began recruiting students and educators who could help develop and deliver the workshops themselves.

The network has since grown to more than 100 student and educator volunteers.

Volunteers work together on presentation slides, classroom activities, discussion questions, and other curriculum materials that can be adapted for different age groups.

This also changed the structure of the project. Instead of O.Water simply giving lectures, students themselves began taking responsibility for environmental education—preparing materials, explaining concepts to younger students, facilitating discussions, and bringing workshops into their own schools and communities.

We have already covered more than twenty schools with a total of over thousands of students. Our next stage is to use this network to expand the program across more elementary, middle, and high schools and eventually reach more.

Students Eagerly Signing Up to Become Re-Earth Volunteers

A Wall of Promises

We also wanted Re-Earth Initiative to exist outside the classroom.

For the World Earth Day, we organized an offline community campaign centered on a very simple activity: asking people to write down a personal environmental commitment.

Participants could choose something connected to their own lives rather than signing onto a predetermined message. Some commitments focused on reducing waste or conserving water and electricity, others reflected broader concerns about pollution and environmental protection.

Our volunteers introduced the activity to participants, talked with them about the environmental issues behind their commitments, and collected the responses. For example, when one participant pledged to use fewer disposable plastic products, our volunteers discussed where this waste goes after disposal and how everyday consumption contributes to a much larger waste-management problem.

Rather than leaving these pledges as individual pieces of paper, we brought them together into large-scale public displays, turning thousands of individual responses into a visible record of community participation.

The exhibition became another form of environmental education. People could stop, read what others had written, compare their own ideas with those of strangers, and see how many different everyday concerns could fall under the much larger idea of “sustainability.”

Can Data Tell an Environmental Story?

For older students, we also began experimenting with a different format: environmental data challenges and online mini-hackathons.

Instead of giving participants a finished explanation of an environmental problem, we provided real-world environmental questions and datasets and asked them to investigate the problem themselves.

For example, students worked with river water-quality data, using basic data analysis, coding, and visualization to identify patterns and communicate what they found. Participants then developed their own interpretations or proposed possible responses to the environmental problems reflected in the data.

This allowed students with interests in computer science and data science to approach sustainability from another direction. Environmental education did not have to mean only learning environmental science; it could also mean learning how to use different tools to investigate an environmental question.

What "Re-Earth" Has Become

O.Water's Re-Earth Initiative started with something relatively straightforward: going into schools and talking with students about environmental issues.

Since then, it has expanded into classroom workshops, a network of hundreds of volunteers around the community, World Environment Day outreach, thousands of public environmental pledges, and student environmental data challenges.

There is still a lot we want to improve. We are continuing to revise our curriculum for different age groups, train more student volunteers, and bring the workshops into more schools and communities in more rural areas.

But perhaps the most important change has been in how we think about environmental education itself. A lecture can introduce a problem. A dataset can help someone investigate it. A public campaign can start a conversation. And a student who learns something in one classroom can later become the person teaching it in another.

For us, the possibility of Re-Earth lies in that ripple: one conversation becoming another, one classroom reaching the next, until an initiative no longer depends on the people who started it.

Perhaps the real measure of Re-Earth, then, is not how many classrooms we enter, but how far an idea can travel after we leave.