We have a huge task ahead of us: the upcoming UN climate meetings at Poznan, Poland, this December will be setting the path towards a post-Kyoto protocol that will be decided next year in Copenhagen. The decisions made in Copenhagen will be essential for the safe future of our children. This ia a call for help to collect as many kid’s voices as possible.
Instead of just talking about the need to protect the future of our children, we want to help that kids are being heard. We realize that there is already a lot being planned for youth involvement at Poznan, but relatively few children (<15 years old) have been given a voice so far. However, the clear and simple messages of children can be more powerful than any other message. There is a good example in the world of fairy tales for that: who noticed that the emperor did not wear any clothes? Not the old wise people, no, it was a little child who called out “He doesn’t wear anything!” – and people started to trust their own intuition.
Our children can help us dare to face and speak out what we otherwise do not dare to acknowledge, as most adults are already caught in the system of competition, greed, short-term thinking, and longing for fame. Children narrow down the problem to the essentials, and can therefore help us focus on what is needed, not on just what we think is achievable witin our relatively narrow frame of mind (which is mostly not enough to avoid a climate catastrophe).
We therefore work on getting children to Poznan, as part or in addition to the youth delegation (which is mostly >18 years of age). At the same time, we want to collect children’s voices from around the world so that attendees at Poznan can take these voices back to their home countries and share them with others.
What we are looking for are three things:
1) Wishes of children about their future (in one sentence)
2) Concrete demands of children from leaders of the world that they think are needed to ensure their dream future (1 sentence)
3) Photos of the children, connected to their wish or demand, and / or photos of artworks of children that paints their dream world
We will select the dreams and demands that are most common among all children, and publish them, together with photos and artwork, in a small brochure that we will pass out in Poznan.
Please help collecting this information from kids in your areas in any way, shape, or form as you can imagine, or if you could help spread the message to others that might be able to help, post it on your webpages,…. If you collect children’s voices in other languages but English and German, then please send along a translation for it.
This will be a collaborative work, so it will not have any specific logo or name attached to it, but will have all logos or names of people that help putting this together. The purpose of this work is not to promote any one organization, but to promote the voice of children, and thus the future of all of us. Of course you will be able to use whatever we collect for your own campaigns to maximize the impact of our work; in fact, you are encouraged to use whatever kids voices we collect for the common good.
It would be very helpful if you could organize the kid’s voices you receive by subject area (energy, transport, food, animals, air,…) before you mail them to me, so it will be easier for me to work my way through them. I will need them latest by November 10.
Thank you so much for your help! I look forward to working with you,
Maiken (maiken.winter at plant-for-the-planet.org)
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