New Global Normal’s Post

Incredibly honoured to have been in Lisbon these past few days to attend Foundation for Environmental Education’s first international conference of the #EcoCampus and present New Global Normal’s model for active global citizenship and intercultural dialogue with Noura McNelis Mahmoud. Here are three key points our presentation touched on: - Active global citizenship and intercultural dialogue are critical aspects of sustainable development and essential to achieving the United Nations’ #SDGs. - Young people must be empowered as active agents in sustainable development. NGN’s bottom-up approach to global citizenship education achieves this by giving young people the space to, as Noura so articulately puts it, “build the models for change, not simply receive them”. - NGN’s framework for #activeglobalcitizenship and intercultural dialogue — which is founded on cultural humility, cultural curiosity, and cultural awareness — has demonstrated great potential to enrich the #EcoSchools program and #sustainabledevelopment education as a whole. We also had the opportunity to attend Maya Galimidi’s workshop on eco-consciousness and experiential learning. A profound takeaway here was the need to reframe sustainability away from a human-centric focus. Indeed, we are not ‘saving the planet’, we are ‘saving ourselves’ — the planet will thrive long past the human species! Thank you to Foundation for Environmental Education and Associação Bandeira Azul de Ambiente e Educação for organising this conference and fostering a space for these important discussions to take place.