Volvo Adventure

The Adventure begins again

The winners of the Volvo Adventure, the world wide search undertaken with UNEP to find the most innovative, imaginative and practical  projects devised by young people to solve environmental problems, has been announced. This year the first prize has gone to the HUNAB team from the Yucatan coast of Mexico for their imaginative solution to local water problems. Using only 900 litres of water, each young person has taken responsibility for a small aquaculture pond, providing a sustainable harvest and a nursery for repopulating the local waterways once they have been cleaned.  This ingenious project has allowed the children to earn extra money to support their ongoing schooling and helped to spread the aquaculture ponds to other young people and improve their environment. Second place went to the visionary ‘tricycle’ project from the Queen Elizabeth II High School on the Isle of Man, combining initiatives such as planting a tree nursery at school, building a bike shed from disused plastic bottles and encouraging ‘Cycle Buses,’ to combat the environmentally unfriendly ‘school run.’ In third place, was the Govt. High School Tilak Nagar Gudhiyari in Raipur, India, the capital of the newly formed State of Chhattisgarh, their ‘Water Drop, a Precious Pearl’ project successfully reduced the wastage and created a more efficient use of the town’s precious public water supply.

This year’s final was fantastic, with all the finalists showing the impact that projects can have when they have sufficient time to develop – this is illustrated by the fact that the top two projects had been entering for a couple of years before winning. So we have decided to give projects more time to develop based upon this feedback from groups building to a bigger and better Volvo Adventure in 2011, the 10^th birthday party for the Volvo Adventure. The benefits:

n        Groups have more time to plan develop their project and gather evidence of its impacts.

n        A set of free education materials and activities to help groups develop their project ideas.

If you working with young people between 13 and 16 years old who are actively involved in devising and managing the project, then you can enter. All you have to do is register and enter your project by visiting www.volvoadventure.org. By registering, you have the opportunity to win an all-expenses-paid trip to the final in Sweden and the chance of a financial reward that could make it possible to run, improve or enhance your project. For young people it could be an adventure that offers a chance to make new friends all over the world and attract international recognition for their project.

Start on the website

All you need to do to get started is to go to the Volvo Adventure website – www.volvoadventure.org. There you will find everything you need to register your project. You will receive a start-up package with instructions on how to proceed. We look forward to seeing your network’s projects! Good luck and remember – it could be your project in the 10^th birthday final!