Christmas Tree Decorated with Trash

or

How to use holiday seasons for development educational actions

Centre

7th step – Placing the tree at the spot of your event and decorating it

The action was performed on December 27th. It is the first day after the Christmas holidays (December 24th-26th) in the Czech Republic. On this day people already go shopping for the season sales. The artist started decorating the Christmas tree at noon. In the meanwhile, the people from our organization were interacting with the public. People were gathering around and discussing the usage of plastics.

8th step – Giving away the paper bags

Between 2pm and 5pm, we performed the main part of our event – we gave away the paper bags. We had five volunteers in place. The selected members of the target group were approached and offered a paper bag for their shopping. Inside of each bag there was a leaflet that explained the purpose of the event and the waste of plastics. We learned from our previous event at the same place, where we felt that other people that were gathering around our event were discouraging the target group YMPs from taking part in the event. Therefore we decided to be more selective: we gave out the paper bags only to the members of our target group.

Inside of the bags there was the following leaflet: the title 'One bag is enough, darling' paraphrased a Czech move called 'Four murders are enough, darling'. The leaflet contains the link to our website, where the MDGs are explained to our target group.

9th step – Talking to media

About ten journalists were present reporting on the event and interviewing us. We explained to them the project and the MDGs.