Climate Action in Education: Planting 10,000 Trees

Dear Donor,

Greetings from warm and sunny Kisumu.

Thank you for your continued support to our project! In our last report we shared about the incredible transformation of Elimu de Ark’s garden an update from our mini botanical garden and RKF’s GlobalGiving Badges. You can read that full report here: [https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/environment-in-education-planting-100-000-trees/reports/?subid=200754]. In this report we share ongoing workshops with the students of Junior Secondary School at a school in Nyalenda where we hope to implement our first contemplative garden (more on this in the report) and a beautiful update from Elimu de Ark’s garden.

Climate Action Workshops

Over the past six months, we have conducted six extensive climate action workshops with a group of 81 students from Central Junior Secondary School’s first cohort. The workshops are a continuation of our commitment to incorporate climate action within public schools in Kisumu County. During these workshops students share and discuss practical ways of becoming climate action champions and learn the importance of climate justice. This is a continuation of the work we started during the pandemic and we hope to reach even more students and schools in the coming months.

Contemplative Gardening

Last month, RKF was selected as a grantee of Mind and Life Institute’s first ever cohort of Contemplative Changemaking Grants. Through this grant we will introduce contemplative gardening and build gardens in 3 schools over the next two years to create spaces that will cultivate environmental stewardship and agency. Below we share a brief project bio:

In a time of climate crisis, climate action education for young students (aged 8+) is crucial to cultivate environmental stewardship and agency. However, this process can in itself induce climate anxiety leaving students feeling helpless and resigned to a bleak future. At RKF, we want to address this through climate action workshops designed to introduce them to contemplative gardening and by helping set up school gardens where students can build a daily practice.

Gardening is a wonderful form of mindfulness that connects us with nature by putting our focus back on our immediate surroundings and in to the earth. It gives us a true sense of agency as we take responsibility for our planet. This project will create a mindful student community within Kisumu that will start contemplative gardening clubs in their schools hopefully creating a culture of gardening and environmental stewardship within their larger communities for years to come.

Going Bananas

Do you remember in our last report we shared about the trees we planted at Elimu de Ark Primary School? The banana tree is about to bear fruit, check out the photo at the bottom of this report!

Gratitude Network Fellowship

Earlier this month, the Rahul Kotak Foundation (RKF) and its Co-Founder and CEO Mansi Kotak were selected as a 2023 Gratitude Network Fellow out of over 1,500 applicants. The fellowship is a year-long program that will help RKF scale up its work to be able to reach even more students living in marginalized communities.

Dear Donor,

Greetings from hot and sunny Kisumu!

Thank you so much for your continued support to our project! In our last report we shared our new partnerships with private schools in Kisumu, the installation of vertical gardens and the start of RKF’s Succulent & Plant Sale to raise money for this project.

In this report, we take a look at a major climate action project we completed in the past year at Elimu de Ark Primary School and share the progress it has made. We also celebrate the 6 GlobalGiving Badges Team RKF received at the start of this year.

Elimu de Ark’s very own School Garden

As the 44th First Lady, Michelle Obama planted a White House kitchen garden with young students from across the United States throughout the Obama administration. In her final address at the garden she said: "This garden has taught us that if we have the courage to plant a seed, just be brave enough to plant it, then take care of it, water it, tend to it, invite friends to help us take care of it, weather the storms that inevitably come, if we have the courage to do that, we never know what might grow."

After training the students of Elimu de Ark and doing garden tours (read full report here), last year, our team partnered with APA Insurance’s Kisumu branch to bring to life a school garden. Through their CSR program, we started a community and kitchen garden for over 200 students at Elimu de Ark Primary School.

Through this partnership, they were able to create circular flower beds that double up as seating for students, plant over 50 trees, 600 shrubs, flowers and plants whilst starting an innovative kitchen garden as part of a Climate Action Project. This transformed the school by giving the students a beautiful, natural space to cultivate their environmental stewardship.

As a part of the project, old discarded tyres were up-cycled to create a garden boundary, bamboo was re-used to create vegetable patches and two vertical gardening bags (for sukuma wiki and spinach) were installed with a conical garden. The conical garden has seedlings of cabbage, lettuce and strawberries which we hope the students will continue to use and harvest from to enjoy as a part of their School Meals Program.

APA Insurance and The Rahul Kotak Foundation also gifted the students of Elimu de Ark with gardening tools, watering cans and a hose pipe so that they can continue to maintain the garden over the coming years.

Are you interested in helping us build more gardens like these across schools in Kisumu County? Become a recurring donor or reach out to us to have a discussion about such a project.

An Update from our Mini Botanical Garden

It’s been hot and sunny in Kisumu over the past few months so we haven’t had as much to celebrate in terms of harvests, but we’ve had some beautiful blooms whose photos we have shared.

We’ve also had many school students (for whom this space was designed) visiting the garden to learn about plants and enjoy small picnics as they take breaks from school. Our most recent visitors were a group of 31 three year olds from Jalaram Academy in Kisumu who asked us lots of questions about the colourful flowers and the pomegranate tree. Some were also able to recognize the vegetables they eat from our veggie patch.

GlobalGiving Badges

Every year, GlobalGiving awards different badges to non-profits on its platform. These badges are trust indicators that give you, the donor, an insight into how our non-profit is performing and being perceived on the platform. We are thrilled to share that for the 4th year in a row, we are one of a select few organizations that has received all six badges on offer by GlobalGiving.

These badges are awarded to non-profits to recognize their efforts in different areas. RKF has received badges for being a top-ranked, highly effective and vetted organization. We are also site-visit verified which means a member of the GlobalGiving team has visited our projects and verified the work we are doing. We were also selected as a Staff Favourite and Project of the Month!

Links:

• Become a Patron: Make a Recurring Donation