Empowering children to make our planet a better place

For the second consecutive edition, HUSE was challenged to design a specific project for the Junior Estoril Conferences - the kid’s edition of the Estoril Conferences.

Aimed for school children aged between 8 and 10 years old, it seeks to engage them with the topic of the event so that, on the last day of the Estoril Conferences, they can showcase their knowledge to other children from Cascais municipality.

This year’s theme was “Global Justice - Empowering Humanity” and so we needed to understand how we could answer this big question: how can we show these children that, given the right knowledge and tools, they can become an agent for change and make the world a better place by having immediate local impact?

We developed a 6-step process:

A. To narrow down the massive task, we picked 5 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to develop actionable challenges for the kids:

Zero Hunger and No Poverty were combined to create one challenge
Life Below Water
Gender Equality
Sustainable Cities and Communities

B. We created a sustainable sticker book with a fun story and characters that talked about the different challenges to help the children navigate the process and further relate to the different topics

C. To help children gather information and develop empathy with the topic we asked local specialist NGO’s to visit schools to talk to them about the problem and work together to address the main issues

D. HUSE and these local NGO’s worked together to define a specific challenge for each class and help the children develop strategies to achieve their goals

E. We created specific metrics to measure the success and prove to these children that their actions can have a real impact

F. We involved storytellers and writers to help children consolidate their findings to create a presentation to advocate for their cause and get 500 other children engaged with the issues and challenges that our world is facing, in an event similar to a model-UN at the Estoril Conferences main stage.

CE Junior 2019 from Huse Innovation on Vimeo.

CREDITS | Writer: Ricardo Henriques | Illustrator: Alberto Faria