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Originally appears in the Spring 2021 issue.

By Marc van Loo

Many students want to change the world. They tend to think, however, that their individual actions won’t have much of an impact. But they are wrong about that, and it’s an enjoyable part of our job as teachers to show them. When students discover the power they possess to affect real change — leveraging some of the unique skills they have as the new generation — they relish it, and they go off creating actions that are packed with value for education and for the world at large. In this article, we share how students aged 11 years and above, from all around the world, have helped — and continue to help — bring lifelong, lifesaving sanitation and clean water to Indonesian families, and in doing so, have been inspiring others to bring about United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) #6: clean water and sanitation for everyone by 2030. We hope that this story will inspire passionate teachers to empower their students to engage and change the world to become a better place.

How local staff and students joined forces to bring real change

Through hits and misses, we learned a couple of things about what makes a successful student-led community project. First, there needs to be a clear human connection: the students need to really know the communities they engage with and feel what they feel. The best way of doing this is to keep it intimate and tie a group of students to a single family, which they can use as an anchor to introduce them to the wider community (should they wish to do so).