A Forest to Make Your Mark!
Its easy to look out to the world as a parent or teacher and see a fairly challenging world with lots of issues. At Doodle Dance issues such as plastic pollution, deforestation and loss of our Bees to name just a few make us MAD!!
Therefore we are committed to developing more creative ways of exploring these topics with children and have started to design our Make A Difference (MAD) workshops. Our first MAD workshop is on Plastic Pollution Reduction and we have joined up with The final Straw Foundation who are a fabulous charity who promote and educate businesses, schools, colleges and others who will listen in how to reduce their plastic and carbon foot print. Their team organises beach cleans and school assemblies and are in the development of further education resources.
Georgie, one of their outreach team has been meeting Jo, discussing content and approaches to use the arts to further this message. They are going to be launching this year Plastic Free Lunch day for schools very soon and part of their pack of info is to share news of Doodle Dances MAD workshop!!!
When there are big problems in the world it’s important to find collaborations to tackle these issues as a team and Doodle Dance really looks forward to growing the relationship with The Final Straw as we try and reduce the amount of plastic in our land, sea and sky!!
All of this talk and research in these issues has really grounded Doodle Dance in realising that we also need to look at the processes of how we work and try and make this as eco as possible. Part of the workshop content is looking at small changes. A few years ago Doodle Dance started to use the search engine Ecosia to support more tree planting each time we researched online info for our projects. Now we have gone one more step further and after realising the amount of paper we use we felt we had to look at ways of reducing this and counterbalancing the carbon/destruction of this process.
Therefore we have joined Ecologi and committed a small amount of income each time we deliver our workshops to planting trees in our ‘Make Your Mark Forest’. Ecoligi platform has also supported us to create targets to reduce our environmental impact one of these to be only sourcing paper from recycled or sustainable sources, or from pre loved, scrap bank or paper amnesties at schools here we are delivering.
We are excited to launch our ‘Make Your Mark Forest this week after delivering Curriculum Ignition Workshops at Southbourne Infants school and Court lane Infant. Our first 25 trees have been purchased and we can’t wait to be adding more and more this term and in the future years we hope to develop further projects that can directly offset our carbon.
This is great news not only for us at Doodle Dance but also for schools as it means schools can book us knowing they are not only supporting their children to make their mark, learn important information for their own sustainable education but also are contributing to a real forest!!!
And to grow our forest Doodle Dance is excited to grow more creative ideas later in the summer. In June Jo Cone will be heading off to meet up with Louise Jaggard from Jumpstart, who is Doodle’s Associate Artist in Leicester. Jo and Louise collaborated along side Claire Pring on the Making a Move Resource for teachers and artists in response to creative ideas needed in the pandemic. Louise a dance artist and forest school practitioner with Jo will be creating a series of workshops and ideas to explore further topics around sustainability including trees, bees and flora, water and waste and rubbish. Jo will be taking ideas to Court Lane Infant school in the later summer term as well as developing ideas with Tuppenny Barn and Louise will be buzzing about parks and other venues in and around Leicester delivering the Bee workshops as part of a local festival.
Doodle Dance is really excited about this new phase in our work and look forward to growing its forest and its impact!!
Photo credit
Eden Reforestation Projects
Ecologi
