10 fun, friendly, factful See Through Network education & outreach projects which promote ‘sustainability’ without mentioning the word
Outline
Each of these See Through News education/outreach projects is fun, friendly and factful, and promotes sustainability, i.e. See Through’s Goal of:
Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active
Like all See Through Network content and products, these resources:
- Are open source and free for anyone to use
- Subtly promote sustainability and carbon reduction
- Can be commercialised by anyone adding sufficient value
Most involve some element of collective or community engagement, which optimises them for use in any community setting. This community could be virtual, or a physical locale, institution, school, university, company, government body or any other place where people gather for a common purpose, and who have an interest in promoting sustainability.
Features
The projects cover a diverse range of topics and points of engagement, but all are designed on See Through’s ‘Fun. Friendly. Factful’ Methodology principles:
- Awareness: public engagement using attractive, entertaining methods, without labelling them with triggering words like ‘climate’, ‘sustainability’ or ‘environmental’. ‘Fun’
- Community: mobilising geographic and virtual communities to environmental issues, creating resilience, unity and legacy skills. ‘Friendly’.
- Education: providing critical climate-related information to targeted staff/students/colleagues in engaging and entertaining ways. ‘Factful.’
The same methodology underpins this Fun/Friendly/Factful concept:
- Storytelling: whether overt teaching of communication and video-making skills, using available technology (smartphones/laptops) and free software, or embedded in classroom activities, all See Through projects are created by storytelling professionals, from backgrounds like filmmaking, broadcasting, advertising and live performance. Sustainability by stealth.
Monetisation
All projects and resources are provided for free, and designed to be available to anyone with the capacity and inclination to promote sustainability.
- Articles on the See Through News website detail how to produce and conduct these activities.
- Videos on the See Through News, See Through Together and See Through Carbon YouTube channels also either explain how they’re done, or showcase the results.
Links to both appear at the bottom of each section below.
Detailed though these explanations are, they are no substitute for intensive, systematic training sessions, overseen by experienced See Through Network contributors.
Corporations, government bodies or institutions with budgets for Environmental Social & Governance (ESG) or Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) or other formal processes for sustainability education, generally prefer to outsource such training sessions to commercial enterprises specialising in delivering educational services.
The See Through Network can train and accredit individuals or local agents to conduct any or all of these services, in person or remotely.
See Through operates without money. Accredited trainers are free to:
- Deliver See Through projects gratis, if they can afford to any the recipients can’t
- Charge businesses or organisations to deliver the same service
Option 1 is the only option for recipients who can’t afford fees.
Option 2 is recommended for service providers who can’t afford to work without payment, or for recipients who only perceive value in services for which they pay.
Equipment
To be practical and sustainable themselves, all See Through projects are designed to be feasible with minimal technical resources. More elaborate, professional equipment delivers higher quality outputs at greater scale and efficiency, but is not necessary.
Some projects, like the Superhero & Supervillain Drawing Competition, require only paper and pens.
Others, like Speaking of Climate, require only a speaker.
Even video-related projects, however, only require the following ubiquitous minimum resources:
- Broadband connectivity for training and uploading content
- One or more smartphones with cameras and video-recording capability
- One or more laptops
So, in no particular order, here are ten proven See Through projects suitable for ESG, CSR or other community or corporate training environments, together with links to related articles and videos.
The articles explain in greater depth how the projects relate to sustainability, as this is often (deliberately) not immediately apparent.
Global Reporter Intensive Training (GRIT)
The Global Reporter Intensive Training (GRIT) programme teaches complete novices the basics of video storytelling and citizen journalism.
GRIT can be delivered in person or remotely, over days or weeks, depending on the recipients’ needs and convenience.
GRIT’s training programme outputs are short videos, uploaded to See Through News’ YouTube channel, amplifying their impact beyond the training course, and leaving a permanent shareable legacy.
The videos’ subject matter is determined by the participants, but always relates to See Through’s carbon drawdown Goal, and topics related to sustainability. Other See Through projects listed here can be incorporated as training modules.
Training is delivered by veteran TV news, documentary filmmaker and broadcast professionals, using See Through News’s free open source training resources.
GRIT’s pilot demonstrated the GRIT programme’s flexibility and robustness by remotely training, in the same group:
- 11-year-olds in the UK
- 18-year olds in Nigeria
- 6-45-year-olds in Uganda
Participants are encouraged to support and train each other as they acquire new skills, on the See one, do one, teach one principle, supervised by See Through’s training staff. Sustainability is thus built into the process itself, as trainees become trainers.
GRIT’s first project remotely trained 125 10-15-year-old students at two HIV orphanages in the slum area of Mathare, Nairobi, Kenya.
In 6 days, they produced 20 original short videos, inspired by their local applications of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. When submitted to an international competition for under-18s, two of these films won awards.
- Main article here with links to online resources.
- Playlist of results here
Vox Pox Project
The Vox Pox Project works as a standalone project, or as a training module in the GRIT programme.
Like many See Through education and outreach projects, its connection to sustainability is not immediately apparent, but media literacy has never been more important in our age of Fake News, misinformation and disinformation.
Sustainability is hard to achieve without sensitising ordinary people to media manipulation.
The Vox Pox Project highlights a basic journalistic technique, the ‘vox pop’ (Latin for ‘voice of the people’, also known as a ‘person-on-the-street interview) to teach the power of editing in visual storytelling.
Participants practise first on each other, then on friends and family, then on members of the public, building their grasp of basic video-making skills, from production to filming, sound recording and editing.
Just as importantly, they work as a team to acquire the confidence and ‘street sense’ required to conduct vox pop interviews, the bread-and-butter of news journalism and documentary filmmaking.
As the interview subjects are questioned on a topic of local interest, which may or may not be directly related to sustainability,Vox Pox Project trainees build connections to their local communities.
Trainees conduct their ‘vox pox’ interviews in familiar local locations, gathering a representative range of different voices (old/young, male/female, educated/uneducated, wealthy/poor).
Each requires the interviewer to adopt different interview styles while remaining on topic and asking the same questions in a consistent, neutral, professional register.
Vox Pox Project trainees then learn to edit these interviews into three different videos, each of which gives an entirely different impression of local opinion, based on exactly the same material.
These Good/Bad/Nuanced edits, are uploaded to See Through News’ YouTube channel, together with the uncut interviews, allowing anyone to see exactly how this manipulation was achieved.
For participants and viewers, the Vox Pox Project is a fun and engaging way to promote critical media literacy in an age of Fake News, misinformation and disinformation.
For participants, it also teaches a fundamental journalistic technique for any news gathering or documentary filmmaking – the vox pop interview.
Speaking of Climate
Speaking of Climate is a 15-minute interactive speech for large audiences, and/or hour-long lecture/workshop sessions for smaller audiences.
The apparent topic of the speech is the importance, pleasure and value of learning foreign languages, a topic that makes it easy to integrate into any educational or corporate context.
Subtly, and entertainingly, woven into this ‘Languages’ speech are key sustainability messages and information about the See Through Goal of Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown By Helping the Inactive Become Active.
By the end of the speech/lectures/workshop, any audience will not only have enjoyed a memorable, fun speech on what many assume is a boring or ‘worthy’ topic, but will also have learned key environmental facts that are unfamiliar to the world’s most active climate activists (see The Learn Game below).
The prominence of the speech’s sustainability messaging can be varied to suit different audiences.
Speaking of Climate has been tested in British secondary schools, but can be adapted to different environments, e.g.:
- Business audiences
- Younger audiences (primary school age)
- Older audiences (universities or adult education)
- Polyglot audiences, for whom the concept of language learning is less intimidating
Speaking of Climate is one of a variety of education-themed resources suitable for schools. Some, like the Superhero and Supervillain Drawing Competition are listed in this article.
Others, like the Learning for Real documentary film screenings, can be found on the See Through News website.
The Think Game
The Think Game was one of See Through’s first outreach projects, developed for deployment at 2021’s COP26 in Glasgow, where it was tested on the world’s most active climate activists, and ordinary local residents.
Participants, under time pressure, are required to give spontaneous scores to a list of 15 names, rating their opinion of their climate activism, with 0 being the ‘worst’, and 10 the ‘best’.
Key features of The Think Game include:
- There are no ‘right or wrong’ answers, as players are only being asked for their opinion.
- The first 14 names are an apparently random selection of well-known brands, countries, celebrities or organisations.
- Name 15 is the surprise item – the score the players give themselves.
- With the tension of the game over, but the camera still rolling, the interviewees reflect on their answers – and discover why it’s called ‘The Think Game’.
The Think Game, now played by hundreds of players around the world:
- Is addictively fun to play and watch
- Generates a unique database of public understanding of ‘climate activism’
- Induces players to want to learn the ‘right’ answers
The Think Game has since been played in a variety of public, private and corporate contexts, and is now refined to the point where See Through Games is now developing an online version.
The ‘real-world’ live version, though played by a single participant, also has significant reach. Whether conducted on the street, at conference entrances, or the atriums of business headquarters, The Think Game attracts curious crowds.
For every player, there are many more observers. Social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok further amplify the reach each time The Think Game is played and recorded.
Once the videos are uploaded to social media, these fun short videos are shared with friends, colleagues and family, creating an online ‘long tail’ legacy.
The Learn Game
The Learn Game is designed to follow The Think Game, to answer players’ desire to know the ‘right’ answers.
Instead of single players playing a short game over 5-10min, The Learn Game is played collaboratively by teams over a longer period of 15-30min.
Like The Think Game, The Learn Game requires no ‘expertise’. Indeed, among its most powerful features is the fact that people who don’t consider themselves to be environmentally active or well-informed can, and often do, out-score those who think they’re well informed on climate issues.
The Learn Game is structured differently from The Think Game, with more stages and levels, but has proved equally engaging and fun for players around the world. See Through Games is also developing an online version.
The Learn Game differs from The Think Game in two key respects:
- Players participate in teams of 2-3 introducing an interpersonal dynamic for players and viewers alike.
- This time, there are right and wrong answers, based on the most up-to-date climate research.
The Learn Game provides multiple levels of learning, by ‘gamifying’ Project Drawdown’s meticulously-researched but poorly-presented ‘Table of Solutions’ to speed up carbon drawdown.
Consequently, The Learn Game’s sustainability messaging is more prominent, but always framed in a fun, competitive, gamified context.
The Learn Game drives players towards the key conclusion from a climate activist perspective – nearly all the biggest and fastest actions we can take to tackle our climate emergency require government regulation, not individual actions.
Sustainability, if achievable, must be a collective effort.
The scale of our climate crisis makes our individual actions almost entirely ineffective, other than the action we can take to compel, convince or coerce our governments to implement and enforce the specific carbon-reducing legislation that can significantly move the dial.
This, in turn, impels and motivates players to play The Act Game (in development), which prompts actions that can measurably reduce carbon, whatever the system of government, but we need to Think before we Learn, and Learn before we Act.
- Article here
- Overview of See Through Games here
- Sample videos here and here
How To Live Without Plastic
Plastic is everywhere now.
Microplastics have been found atop Mount Everest, in the Mariana Trench and in foetal tissue, as well as forming islands in the oceans, and in the guts of marine birds and animals.
This makes it hard to imagine a world without plastic, but we don’t have to – we just have to ask an old person.
It’s sobering – potentially inspiring – to think that plastic only became ubiquitous in the industrialised countries in the 1960s, much later in the developing countries. Either way, in Global North or Global South, this means a world without plastic is within living memory.
Not all pathways to sustainability fork ahead of us, contingent on new technology or radical social change. Sometimes, we need only retrace our steps, and take a different fork in the road.
How To Live Without Plastic wraps up this insight in a video-making project.
Like The Vox Pox Project, How To Live Without Plastic teaches sustainability lessons via learning the basics of news reporting and documentary filmmkaing.
In a structured way, How To Live Without Plastic instructs novice filmmakers on how to approach old people – anyone who grew up in an era before plastic – and to ask them how they managed.
Their answers not only empower old people, re-casting them from museum pieces into fonts of sustainability wisdom, but also provide real-world, proven, sustainable alternatives to our over-consumption culture.
This process is enlightening for the young, and invigorating for the old. How To Live Without Plastic turns old people from repositories of obsolete crafts and stories, into valued sources of inspiration, guides to a sustainable future.
Whether showing how to make a bag from palm leaves, or describing how milk and bread was sold before plastic bottles and plastic bags, How To Live Without Plastic provides a bridge between the past and the future, via our unsustainable present.
Betting the Farm
There are many free carbon footprint calculators available online, but farmers hardly ever use them.
Calculating a farm’s carbon footprint has many technical challenges, but they’re trivial compared to the storytelling challenge of motivating sceptical farmers to do something they are not legally obliged to do, and for which they see no immediate commercial advantage.
This scepticism is inherent to farmers around the world, across different cultures, languages and geographies.
Misrust of the new, especially anything connected to ‘red tape’ and regulation, might come with the job of being constantly exposed to the whims of nature, the weather and the changing climate.
This instinctive friction against carbon reporting, for example, is unfortunate, as farmers also tend to be natural ‘conservationists’, whose work gives them an instinctive grasp of, and respect for, sustainability
To move farmers from climate reporting inaction to climate reporting action (via sibling carbon reporting ecosystem See Through Carbon), See Through Together’s creative team, of TV entertainment format experts, policy experts, carbon accountants and documentary filmmakers, created Betting The Farm.
In Betting The Farm, farming families are filmed at their kitchen tables, reacting to a video, taking them through stages culminating in the prize of free carbon footprint calculation & carbon-busting advice.
The role of the trainees is limited to recruiting farming family participants, producing the filming (which is even possible to do remotely), and editing the results.
The fact that there is no interviewer or presenter standing in between the voices of the farmers and the viewer is one of Betting The Farm’s key innovative features. Instead of having farmers’ views framed and interpreted by a non-farmer third party, the audience is offered unmediated access to a farming family’s ‘in-farm’ debate, around the farmhouse kitchen table.
Betting The Farm is designed to be fun. Its format highlights soap-opera subtleties of observing the family dynamics to deduce who’s really in charge – does the ‘retired’ father really still call the shots, or does everyone ultimately defer to the ‘quiet’ mother, or go-ahead child?
Betting The Farm’s game-show format creates narrative tension via authentic jeopardy, showcasing the practical value of putting creative and imaginative storytelling in the service of technocratic sustainability initiatives like See Through Carbon.
Betting The Farm’s success rate to date, after 3 random trials with UK arable and dairy farmers, and Japanese rice farmers: 100%.
Betting The Farm shows the benefits of See Through’s holistic approach, combining hard science with sophisticated storytelling, in the service of making sustainability fun, friendly and factful.
Each new type of farmer, from every new country, in every new language, increases Betting The Farm’s educational and outreach power. Each featured family (and language) has a huge multiplier effect when viewed on social media, encouraging both rational debate about sustainability in agriculture, and further uptake of the See Through Carbon ecosystem.
Betting The Farm is designed to be produced with minimal local facilities and expertise, requiring only 1 local producer, 1 laptop, 1 smartphone – and 1 pair of dice in a box…
Superhero & Supervillain Drawing Competition
The See Through Superhero & Supervillain Drawing Competition is a free teaching resource, differentiated to suit children between the ages of around 4-120.
This activity has been tested extensively in a variety of contexts, from family homes, to primary school classrooms, to universities, to public festivals. The Superhero & Supervillain Drawing Competition never fails to appeal to, engage, and delight anyone who comes across it.
Participants choose ‘briefing cards’ for 8 superheroes, and 8 supervillains, and then simply draw what they think they look like.
Along with descriptions of their gender, nationality, age, and trademark moves, the briefing cards describe each character’s superpowers. The eight superheroes all have powers that celebrate rational debate; the eight villains all exemplify rhetorical bluster.
Superheroes and supervillains have long been embedded in popular culture. This ‘competition’ (though participants soon forget about what they’re competing about, or what the rules or prizes are) absorbs children of all ages, including parents accompanying young children persuaded to re-discover their inner child’s love of drawing.
Resources are all available for free on the See Through News website. No equipment beyond an internet connection, some paper and a pen, is required.
At first, second and third glance, the Superhero & Supervillain Drawing Competition‘s sustainability relevance may not be obvious.
Understanding, and valuing, the difference between evidence-based argument and irrational appeals to emotion, are fundamental to any sustainability argument.
Promoting rational debate, while exposing the tricks of the misinformation merchant’s trade, are pre-requisites for effective climate action, and hence to sustainability.
1 Sunday Morning, 4 Films
The pilot for this ‘unique experiment in community filmmaking’ took place in a small area of North London, but is designed to work anywhere.
Professional documentary director and producer mentors help four local amateur filmmakers identify, and make four short films, celebrating local volunteers who spend their weekends on projects that benefit the community.
Alongside, complete novice filmmakers are taught filmmaking basics, using projects that focus on local issues and community members, from How To Live Without Plastic to the Vox Pox Project and Superhero Drawing Competition.
The topics of their films celebrate unsung community volunteers, who spend their weekends – often behind closed doors or behind walls – quietly benefitting their local communities.
The entire project, embracing public venues, schools, educational institutions, local government bodies, formal community organisations, and informal local networks, is designed to involve as many different elements of the community as possible.
The resulting films are revealed to family, friends and the local community at a World Premiere screening, providing a climax to the project.
The short-term goal of the World Premiere creates a short-term focus, and sense of momentum that is often lacking from ongoing community projects, while creating new bonds and connections – and filmmaking skills – that enable the project to leave a long-term legacy.
1 Sunday Morning, 4 Films is designed to be very flexible in terms of commitment and duration.
- Curation: five key roles (project manager, producer, 2 mentors, technical support) are sufficient to get the project going. For the pilot, they worked pro bono, but of course could be paid if funding can be found.
- Duration: The London pilot project took place over two months, but with sufficient local enthusiasm, the event could be compressed into as few as 2 weeks, or of course extended over a longer period.
Community Facebook Group Network
Since See Through News began its first experiments with leveraging the free infrastructure of the world’s biggest social media platform to promote sustainability in 2021, the reach of its global network of Facebook community groups has gone from zero to a million in four years, and is still growing at 5-10% per month.
Most are members of local community groups, serving a geographic range of up to around 500,000, but mostly in the range of 50,000-250,000, the scale of the lowest level of local governance in most countries.
The scopes of these ‘X Notice Board’ (also ‘X Market Place’, sometimes ‘I Love X… ) groups are mainly determined by its members, but people everywhere want to find reliable local businsseses, and local businesses everywhere seek dependable local customers.
Thus, local businesses advertising their services to local residents, and the latter asking for the former, form the bulk of the posts in these groups, along with community events. Facebook’s group function is set up for exactly this, and there are nearly always existing groups offering similar services.
Yet the groups moderated by See Through News volunteers (sometimes local, sometimes a continent away – it turns out to make little difference) consistently out-perform other community groups, over time.
This is easily explained. Nearly all local groups are run by individuals or businesses with a vested commercial interest in promoting their own services and suppressing those of their competitors. By contrast, See Through groups are moderated by volunteers motivated only by:
a) strengthening their local community
b) promoting sustainability
c) both
Not all the posts in these groups, are purely commercial. Members also use them to express their passion for, concerns about, or action regarding, local issues and events.
This means See Through, as group Admins, is in a unique position to nudge public debate in certain directions, by occasionally promoting certain posts, including its own projects.
This Facebook group network thus fulfuls two key sustainability-promoting functions, in addition to providing the obvious community benefits that drive their growth:
- Brand Building: Daily reinforcement and deepening of trust in the See Through brand
- Extended Reach: Unique and exclusive access to a perfect ‘Unwilling Inactivist’ target audience, i.e. ordinary people who ‘accept the science and reality of human-induced climate change, but who feel powerless to do anything about it’.
- Refined Storytelling:This target audience is conveniently separated into geographically separate petri-dishes, ideal for A/B testing different messaging and storytelling approaches to promote the See Through Network’s sustainability goals
See Through Together adopts a similar sustainability-through-storytelling strategy on the world’s #2 social media platform, YouTube. There, See Through’s audience reach is more obvious, as viewers/subscribers/engagement data is publicly aggregated, and the audience is consequently more uniform and consolidated.
The characteristics of Facebook and YouTube thus provide complementary opportunities for See Through to reach different groups in different ways, further amplifying the See Through Network’s unique outreach and educational power through the lenses of geography and theme.
For example, any of the other projects in this list can be advertised, promoted or otherwise amplified via See Through-administered local Facebook groups, as well as via themed Playlists on the See Through Together channel.
Building up this reach, and trust in the See Through brand, takes time and dedication, but each new group member or YouTube viewer increases the See Through network’s capacity to effect change, educate, inspire, and promote sustainability.
