From Poverty to Prosperity (P2P) is a new development awareness project working in three EU countries plus Ghana. It seeks to address three challenges. Firstly, current development awareness for young people is not significantly changing behaviours and attitudes to the extent necessary to mobilise support for the Millennium Development Goals (MDG's). Secondly, much development education is based on the needs of people in developing countries and fails to recognise the needs of young people in Europe. Thirdly, the quality of development education amongst the new member states is very weak, with little formal support for schools and teachers in the way of training, resources and programmes.
The P2P project has been designed to achieve real change and by promoting ways to achieve genuine active citizenship within and outside the classroom, in school life and into the wider community. The Challenge Packs and website will present opportunities for teachers and pupils to share examples of creative and sustainable solutions that have been formulated in the UK, Bulgaria, Hungary and Ghana.
As well as hosting all Challenge Pack lesson plans and supporting resources, this website will also serve as a sharing platform for schools and students. The ability for young people to share and communicate needs, opinions, and attitudes towards global development issues to stakeholders and decisionmakers will help bring about active change. Following work on the Challenge Packs, each school should generate their own School Development Charter.
Schools can best decide how to do this. For example there may be time given during form time or within a Citizenship lesson so students can work collaboratively to come up with some ‘Charter’ suggestions. These can then be put forward for a vote during a school assembly so that only the best ideas are selected to upload onto the website. Another way of doing the vote is to select a special committee of students who decide between themselves which are the best ‘Charter’ ideas. The final School Development Charter will contain ideas about individual, school, local, or national actions that could be initiated. These might be pledges, campaigns, initiatives or new ways of doing things. Student led active citizenship can begin…
Teachers can register on the website and create a profile for their own school. They will then obtain a user name and password so that they are able to upload ‘Charter’ ideas and share them with other registered schools, from the UK, Bulgaria, Hungary and Ghana.
For those teachers who have not passed a training, but are still willing to pick up P2P, we have made available a Teacher training pack and presentation. Please click on the respective links to download:
P2P Teacher training pack
P2P Teacher training presentation