Our main objective was to raise awareness about global issues among students and to contribute to achieving the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. So we designed activities, workshops and visits to achieve the following objectives: -To motivate students to think critically and creatively about issues related to environmental sustainability. -To raise awareness about each article in the Declaration of Human Rights and make students protect and defend both their rights and the rights of others, based on values such as equality,dignity,respect,non-discrimination -To create a safer and more peaceful world by promoting inclusion and diversity, making students get rid of their bias toward people who are different from them. -To increase the number of people with an entrepreneurial mindset by teaching students the hard and soft entrepreneurship skills and to provide students with opportunities in real-life. -To develop school motivation of the students in the risk group and contribute to decreasing early school leaving and absenteeism rates -To develop students’ ICT and foreign language skills.
We applied because we tried to motivate students, most of them from low economic backgrounds with the hope that after working on the SDGs, they would understand their importance if they wanted to live in a better, greener and more sustainable world where everybody had the same opportunities without difference due to genre, race, religion, culture, ideology or economic status. Besides, we thought that this project could be a good opportunity for those students who preferred to learn in a more cooperative way and could be a good tool to motivate them and decrease absenteeism rates. We created a partnership with schools from Turkey, Portugal, Germany and Spain. When we began to design the project,we discussed and determined common deficiencies in terms of awareness level of school communities,teaching SDGs issues and chose 4 of those issues (entrepreneurship, climate change, Human Rights and Inclusion and Diversity) to work on, because they affected all the countries and required global solutions and expert guidance. We had the collaboration of other institutions, families, our community, our city council, NGOs too and all the actions were disseminated on the networks and media.