Lesson video

And welcome to lesson five on Global Problems. So, it's time to find a nice quiet space, turn off your phones from any notifications and distractions, see if you can find a little bit of room for yourself, in order to focus for today's lesson.

I'm Mrs. Baker, and I'm going to see you in just a moment when I can tell you what we need to start the lesson.

See you in a minute.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Global Problems unit.

We are now on lesson five, and by now hopefully you've remembered what you need, but just in case we need to make sure we have something to write with, and something to write on, and to have our brains ready to do lots of thinking.

There is some worksheets that go with this lesson, they're not essential, you can use your paper to record things down.

But if you do want to have those nearby, you can use those as well.

Okay, lots to do as ever in today's lesson, and today for the first time rather than looking at the global problems, we're actually going to be thinking about what we can do about the global problems, so a bit of a shift from investigating what the problems are, to more looking about how to help with them.

So quite a positive shift I hope, and again as interesting as ever.

So, without further ado, let's start thinking what our sections of today's learning are, okay? So, we are thinking about today how we can take action on global problems, we can have a bit of a recap on what global problems you're aware of from, our previous lessons, we're going to look at the different organisations and see how they take action on global problems, then we're going to have a look at individuals who are known for taking action on global problems, and then also thinking about the skills that people need to take on if you're going to take on global problems. And that's going to be a strong link to your lesson and your final lesson in the unit lesson six, okay? Let's get ready to go.

So, straight into a task today everybody, what global problems are you aware of? What can you remember? What have we studied so far? Perhaps you've done some further research.

Perhaps you already know some that we haven't covered.

So, you can design yourself a diagram that looks something like this, or you can design your own version, there is a copy of this in worksheets if you need, if you want to have that to hand, or if you don't want to do a diagram by all means, write a list or do some bullet points, okay? So, I'm going to be suggesting that you spend about two or three minutes maximum on this, it's just a really quick recap.

So if you'd like to pause the video now, and give yourself two minutes maximum for this, and then come back to me.

So pause your video now, for two minutes on a task.

Okay brilliant, I had to manage to think of lots and have managed to recall lots of the information that we've looked at in previous lessons.

So I've put together this quick grid, we've used it before, and you can see that global warming's up there in the top row, along with animal extinction, we know these two are quite closely linked from our lesson, then lack of fair trial, which is something we investigated in last lesson, linking to the human rights problems that exists today.

We've got water pollution and plastic pollution, again, those two things are often linked, so really important to be aware of those.

Being sent to prison without a good reason, again, we can link that perhaps back to lack of a fair trial.

But not even having a reason to be arrested in the first place certainly is a big problem and a number of our global campaigns on human rights often face going to prison without good reason.

We've also got droughts or flooding being a problem, no right to protest being a problem, and poverty in general being a global problem.

Now you probably have other examples or maybe some that are similar on your diagram, if you haven't got any of those I've got there and you want to add them, then feel free to do so.

And remember, you can pause the video at additional points if you'd like to, separately to when I suggest.

But I'm sure your chart has got or your diagram has got lots of information, so for now, let's move on.

So, what can be done then to solve these problems? With such a large number of problems that are so different, it can be hard to think about how to solve them.

However, there are already people and organisations that work hard to solve and improve these global issues.

And they work either locally, nationally or internationally.

Their work can make a difference to the world we live in.

So we've already met some of these organisations.

And we're just going to take a little bit more longer now, to think about what they are and what they do.

So, the first area of global problems, we're going to investigate how people resolve are the environmental problems. So, environmental organisations then, as we've seen in our lessons, environmental issues are vast, and to help to solve these, it is important that action is targeted in the right way.

To help this, some organisations specialise in certain areas.

For example, if you remember our lesson on fracking, we learned about the campaign group Frack Off.

By providing the information, leaflets, a website to share stories, information videos and more, they enable groups to campaign locally about a national issue.

So Frack Off was one of these particular environmental organisations that had a very targeted focus, okay? So, whilst they had a website that was available nationally, people used their resources locally, and could reach out to other local organisations from Frack Off, and say, "How did you do this way successful? What's the best way to run this, in order to make successful demonstrations and successful organised campaigning?" Okay, so sometimes it can be a very specific reason that these organisations exist.

In this case, it was about the issue of fracking.

So, other examples of environmental organisations, include the World Wildlife Fund, and I'm sure many of you will be familiar with the sight of that logo and the panda bear.

And then there is The Wildlife Trust as well.

And rather than working with sort of large animals, they look at things that are smaller mammals so, the badger is their logo and they work within sort of wildlife or hedgerows and our woods and things.

Another large organisation that works nationally and internationally, is Greenpeace, okay? So you've probably heard of Greenpeace may not have, but they tend to do things on quite a wide scale, and they're a large organisation.

Other it's Friends of the Earth, who again, organise locally but take national action.

Then we've got an organisation, Surfers Against Sewage, which started off as quite a small organisation who were campaigning about water pollution, but then the organisation grew and grew, and now they run all kinds of things from litter picks to lobbying governments to say that what's going on with water is not good enough, and they also run a plastic free schools campaign, where you can go to their website and find out about how to arrange lessons, and how to arrange a campaign pack, to encourage your school to be plastic free, okay? So, next task for you everybody, I would like you to identify an environmental problem you would like to take action on.

When deciding on the problem you would like to take action on, consider if it is a local, national or international issue.

And do you know of a group already taking action? Okay, so perhaps you know of a group locally, that's doing something, about a global problem, but on a local level, perhaps you're already a member of an organisation or perhaps your parents or somebody that you know, is a member, in which case you might want to support them.

Or perhaps you've got your own ideas from research that you've done after the lessons, or something that's come up during one of our lessons.

So there it's, let's have a think about something at the moment, you feel quite strongly about, what would you like to take action on.

Now if you're happy to start that task, you can pause the video now.

If you'd like a little bit support, then stay with me, and I'll see what I can do to explain it a little bit further for you.

Okay, so, if you need some support, you should still be there with me.

So, let's have a look at this together then.

What we need to do, is for you to decide on a problem that you feel is really important, okay? So this could be different for everybody.

Everyone has a separate passion, and it could be dependent on where you live, or it could be something to do with somewhere that somebody you know works.

Anything that seems important to you is always going to be a better kind of action, because it means that you feel passionate about.

So, I've given you some sentence starters and then maybe some options that you could add, but you could equally add something else.

So, the environmental problem I have chosen is, and these are some of the topics that we've looked at already.

You could easily add in human rights there from our lesson, I have chosen this problem because, then you could say perhaps it's personal to you, and go on to explain why.

You could say it affects your area and go on to explain why, or you could go on to say it's having a serious effects on other issues in the world, and then just go on to explain why.

The issue is, and then decide whether it's local, national, or international.

So local would be in perhaps your town, your village, or even your county.

National would be within the UK and international will be something that affects more than one country.

And then finally, I know that, and if you know of an organisation that already supports to work on the problem, takes action on this problem.

So hopefully that gives you a bit more structure if you weren't quite sure how to go about that.

So if you'd like to pause the lesson now, pause the video, you will be able to complete that task.

Okay, great job everybody.

Hopefully, across everybody taking the lessons, there is a great big range of problems that you'd like to solve.

And that's why it's important to make sure it's very personal to you because it really helps attack a number of the global problems and also, it gives you enthusiasm and encouragement to carry on.

The global problem I would like to take action on is global warming.

This is an international problem, but people can make a difference even in their own homes, which makes it local to me.

So this is a suggestion of how I might start answering these questions.

So I know that global warming is a massive issue and internationally, lots of governments needs to take action.

But I also know for some of the research that we've done and looking at some of our lessons that small things can make a big impact too, and that we can't always rely on government action that people like us also have to do things.

I have chosen this problem as global warming, causes and is linked to other problems. For example, due to global warming, the polar ice caps are melting.

This puts animals such as polar bears at risk of extinction.

It also means parts of the world could flood.

A number of organisations work to try and stop global warming, including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.

So I've identified the organisations that I know of already that are trying to help with global warming.

I've identified why I understand that global warming is such a problem, it links to animal extinction, and also possible flooding.

So it's a really really serious problem and I think probably, locally you could do something to help, and you could engage with other ideas nationally as well.

So, who else tries to help that apart from environmental organisations? Well, one other group are what we call Non Governmental Organisations.

So that NGO stands for Non Governmental Organisations.

So these are people that don't make a profit, they're non-profit making, and they're a volunteer group of citizens who work on a local, national or international level to achieve an aim.

They are not controlled by the government, but they often work closely with them.

An example of an NGO is Amnesty International.

So these people are similar to a charity in that they don't make profit, and they often have to rely on donations so that they can get the money, but they do a range of work and one of the things they will do is work very close with governments to try and change policy and make sure governments are aware of issues that are going on, okay? So let's have a look at how an NGO might work and we'll use Amnesty as the illustration.

So Amnesty International actually has its headquarters in London, but it also has big offices in the UK, and 50 international offices across the world.

So if we have a look at where those are, they've got offices in Europe, so countries across Europe, and also offices from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.

So literally covering the whole of the globe, there's Amnesty International offices with volunteers working in them, to try and raise awareness and deal with the global problem of human rights abuses.

Within London, sorry within the UK, is a similar situation.

So they have UK as head offices or formal offices, and then even now within than that, they have what they call local branches, which is organised by local people, and people like me or you will attend a local branch meeting, find out what they want, what they need to do, organise education, organise fundraising, organise awareness raising, and they have over 280 groups within the UK, that meet to discuss and teach others and raise awareness.

And some of those groups will be youth groups because one way that schools can get involved is with Amnesty International, is to organise a youth group, where within school a group of students come together and raise awareness of human rights issues, and do talks and put up displays and things that Amnesty can send out all of those resources for people.

So the kind of work that Amnesty International does is research, they know exactly what's going on with human rights abuses, they advocate and lobby to make sure that governments in this country are trying to sort of talk to governments in other countries where the human rights abuse is, and addressing any human rights abuses there have been in the UK, and they also take action and organise campaigns.

So some of you may have heard of the Write for Rights Campaign, wherever everybody writes letters over certain key political prisoners or prisoners of conscience or other people that have their human rights abused normally by the government, and it's encouraging those governments to take seriously these human rights abuses.

And that happens every year on the 10th of December, which is the United Nations International Human Rights Day.

So, apart from Amnesty International, we also have a range of other NGOs.

Some of these you may have heard of, some of them you may not have heard of.

So the Red Cross then works internationally and it provides support for people in a range of ways.

Often when there's been a disaster like a natural disaster, an earthquake, and or floods the Red Cross are some of the first on the scene providing aid and provides medical care.

Some of you may have also taken part in Red Cross lessons because they also provide learning activities and they provide first aid training as well.

So some of you may have already been involved with some of this NGO's work.

Then we've got Oxfam, who are often campaigning and making people aware of the conditions that people live in, where there's a risk to health of problems, perhaps in refugee camps, or where there's lack of clean water and access to food, they often run campaigns to let people know, and they try and take action and ask for donations to support that.

Save the Children is one that people are often familiar with as well, they work here in the UK as well as internationally, focusing on improving the rights of children and making sure they are protected and kept safe.

Underneath, you may or may not be familiar with the ID of the Red Crescent.

Now all of the activities that are carried out by the Red Cross are pretty much carried out by the Red Crescent as well.

And most countries that they follow Islam and our Muslim countries will have a Red Cross, sorry, will have a Red Crescent organisation instead of a Red Cross organisation.

And if your RE is good, you will be able to work out why the crescent is used instead of the cross.

Someone shouting at me to tell me why that is? Yeah, so the cross is often seen and is an important symbol within Christianity, whereas that crescent shape is an important crescent symbol within Islam, okay? So many of the Islamic countries will be the first on the scene in certain areas, to provide medical support and aid and help people in natural disasters, at the scene of wars, scene of earthquakes, and the Red Cross and Red Crescent work side by side, supporting people as NGOs.

And then we have Human Rights Watch.

It's another human rights organisation, and they are also based in the UK and part of their role is to literally monitor human rights abuses, keep a track of them, and raise awareness to governments across the world to say what they found and when.

So range of NGOs that covered different kinds of global problems, but all there to try and tackle them.

So one option you might have is to find out more about the work of one of these, or find out if there's any campaigns they're running, that you could get involved with, so that would be one way in which you could try to help solve a global problem.

And this will become important when you get to lesson six, and you start thinking about the topic in lesson six.

But I'm not going to give too much away until the end of the lesson, when I can explain all of that to you.

So, quick chance now for a bit of recap, just to find out what you can remember.

Let's see an NGO stands for, is it a New Government Organisation, a Non Governmental Organisation, a No Government Option, or New Governmental Organisation? I'm going to count you down from five, four, three, two, one, have you got it? I'm sure you have.

Yeah, good well done.

It's option two, a Non Governmental Organisation, well done everybody.

Next, NGOs aim to make a profit, is that true or false? Go to count you down in five, four, three, two, one, is false, okay? They're nonprofit making.

So they often rely on donations in order to make their campaigns work, but they certainly aren't in it to make money for themselves.

So, we're now going to look at something that really is important, and we're going to talk about idea of changemakers and what they do.

So a changemaker is an activist that makes a difference at a local, national or international level.

So if you think back to the end of lesson four, on human rights and that's Eleanor Roosevelt quote, she said that, "We need to look for citizenship action in the small places in order to ensure that we have human rights protected everywhere." Okay, and that's what changemakers do.

Changemakers can make a difference, either at a massive international level, or at a very local level, but their impact to be just as important wherever it's taken.

So, here's a changemaker, that you probably all put to use to, that is Greta Thunberg.

So recently, Greta has become a famous changemaker or activism on environmental status.

She began her campaign alone in Sweden but due to her determination and focus, she has come to represent climate protesters across the world.

She has been invited to speak at international events with world leaders and her views are heard by millions of people.

So what turns on from Greta, having individual action on quite a local level, just doing a protest herself, suddenly became these international movements, and she is invited to really important meetings, she's there with leaders of countries, she's speaking to very powerful people to help them see the urgency, as she sees it, with regards to environmental issues.

So Greta is a very powerful changemaker.

Now, this changemaker, you probably don't know about and that's Little Miss Flint or Mari Copeny.

So eight years old, Mari began her activism by writing to President Obama to meet with him regarding water pollution in her town.

The town of Flint had changed water supply, and since then many families could not drink the water shower without it burning their eyes or even play water games.

The President wrote back and visited the town and pledged $100 million to repair the water supply.

Unfortunately, this was not enough and families still suffered and had to use bottled water.

Many families could not afford this.

Mari went on to start a fundraising page, which made over $250,000 and thousands of bottles of water, okay? So, Mari then started at a very young age, just by writing to President Obama and she was going on a school trip to Washington, and she said, I'm coming to Washington, and I'd be really grateful if I could meet with you or maybe your wife and just explain what's going on in my town.

And you can actually find her letter online, you can see exactly what she said at eight years old, and the letter that President Obama wrote back to her.

So it's quite an interesting letter to look at.

That wasn't where Mari left it because now she'd realise what a difference he could make for people.

So Mari continued with her work founding the Dear Flint Kids project, and raising over $10,000 for students in her community.

Now having an understanding of how importantly water is to people, Mari went on to found, #WednesdaysForWater.

Here she raises awareness of places around the world that need clean water and provide ways people can help.

So understanding how urgent it is for people to have access to clean and safe water, Mari also knows that even though the water in Flint still isn't completely clean and safe, at least they can access bottled water quite easily.

But she also realises that there's other countries across the world, where they don't have any access to clean water or clean running water, so there's children that die from diseases that's carried in water.

So she and campaign called #WednesdaysForWater, to try and raise awareness and show people how they could support others who haven't got access to water.

Mari is now 14 years old, and understands more about political and how political leaders can support her campaign.

Her activism continues to grow stronger, what started as a local project for her town is now an international campaign.

So Mari she's got older, has learned how to grow a campaign, how to use social media effectively.

She's also learned that to have any influence on people, is important to get political leaders to support you, social climb work with those in America, and she is growing her following and making a bigger and bigger difference.

From an eight year old writing a letter to a president, Mari is now gone on to make enormous changes for a number of people, okay? So there is one changemaker doing some really great stuff.

So, you've just had a look at two changemakers, who were doing quite different things.

But, I think there's probably some similarities between Mari and Greta and not just that they were both girls.

You don't have to be a girl to be change maker by the way, but that was just two examples that I found, and I thought they're both really good examples because they show how from something very small just working your own community, you can have an even bigger influence it just grows and you can suddenly have an influence at an international level.

So, these changemakers have certain abilities and skills, and they allow them to be successful.

So what I'd like you to do is draw a picture of a person, an outline of a person, or a gingerbread outline, or if you've got the worksheets from today's lesson, you'll find a copy of the gingerbread outline on there.

And I would like you to law, sorry, label or draw the skills and abilities you think a changemaker needs to take action about global problems. Now what you might like to do, is draw a little illustrations.

So for example, if you think they need to be good at communicating, you might want to draw a mouth, to and then draw a line of that same communication for example.

So I've just given you one thing that I think change makers need.

They need to be strong communicators, okay? I would like you to make these as attractive and as detailed as possible, with as many skills and abilities as you can think of, okay? So, allow yourself I would say maybe five to seven minutes doing this, you can call them in use colours, and through pictures you can write activities and you can write skills and abilities around the edge, just have a really good think about what would make somebody able to do effective, sorry, able to be an effective changemaker, okay? There's going to be core things that work for everybody.

So, if you'd like to pause your video now, and spend up to seven minutes on this task.

Okay, everyone, I hope your gingerbread man or gingerbread person or whoever you have drawn has got a lot more around it than mine has, but I've just got some quick examples for those of you maybe who were struggling a bit, and these can be helpful and then you can carry on.

So, good communication skills is the one I gave you, before you paused your video.

Then I think they probably need to be passionate about their cause.

And I've already spoken about that at the start of the lesson, haven't I? About how important it is to be passionate about what you believe in.

And the reason you need to be passionate about your cause is because if you're not passionate, then you might just give up and that's why you need to be resilient.

And you can see on the other leg there, I've put resilient, because actually, if you're not resilient, and you just give up at the first hurdle, then you're not going to be a very good changemaker.

Because everyone faces challenges but when you're trying to solve a global problem, you are going to have to face some really big challenges.

So you have to think, "Okay, that didn't work, but I'm going to do something else." Then you need to be hard working.

You just have to expect to have to do things for yourself, you might be able to get people who can do them with you, but the harder you work, it's probably going to lead to a more successful campaign, and that leads to more change.

And then you probably should be able to make some good arguments and debate well, if you look at Greta, she sits up there with all those political leaders you saw her speech at Davos back in one of the lessons earlier in this unit, so being able to debate well and put your ideas across, it's going to be quite important to be a changemaker.

So I'm sure you came up with lots more, but these are a few examples that I think are common to all changemakers, and really key.

So I hope you managed to get those.

So, we've come to the end of lesson five.

Well done, everybody, I'm sure you've done a great job.

So to take this further, to see what else you can do.

I'd like you to try and share your learning from today with somebody else.

Tell people which global problem you thought was most important and why, because sometimes just by telling people, what you think was the most important it makes them aware of that problem, they might not even know about it.

So the more we talk about these things, the better.

Then, if you want to take some action, you can investigate.

Is there a local changemaker near you? What difference are they making to your local community? Normally, in all communities, there is some people that are changemakers.

They're doing something that will make a difference.

It might not necessarily be on a global problem, but they're doing something in the local community that creates change and helps people or change its views, so see what you can find out.

Is there a local organisation, taking action on global problems? If there is, find out what actions they're taking perhaps you could get involved, perhaps you could get some of your friends to get involved.

It might be something really simple that has a really big impact.

As ever, keep your notes, keep asking questions and enjoy investigating further.

I would really love to see any work that you've done from today.

I'm particularly interested to see your abilities and skills outline people, because I bet you've come up with some really good ideas.

And I would also love to hear about any local changemakers and local groups, to hear what they're doing.

So if you're able to share those with me, please ask your parents or guardian to share your work on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, by tagging in @OakNational, and using the hashtag #LearnwithOak, you can also use the title citizenship too, so we know which subject it's coming from.

Now the reason I told you that your skills and abilities gingerbread people were really important, and the reason I wanted you to think of a global problem that you quite like to solve, is because next week, or next lesson, lesson six is the last in the Global Problems unit.

So, that's the one and I've saved the best for last guys, you're going to really enjoy it I hope.

That's the one where we don't investigate global problems anymore, we don't investigate what other people have done to solve the global problems, but we're going to investigate and you're going to investigate, I don't do much work next lesson, you guys do it all.

So you're going to try and work out how you can organise a project, and you can take some action about a global problem.

So sound exciting, something like you'd like to do? I hope so.

So, I can't wait to see you for lesson six, where you're going to be able to talk about how to make a difference, how to be a changemaker, which global problem you might like to solve, and if you do it really well, you might also stand a chance of getting your ideas published by newspaper.

So lots and lots of things in lesson six, how to take responsible action.

So make sure you come and find that lesson, and I look forward to seeing you there.

One last thing to do, I'm sure you've got the hang of this by now but it's time to complete your exit quiz just to prove how much you've learned and how will you done today, once you've done that, I hope you take very good care of yourselves and I'll see you for our final lesson in this unit next time.

Bye bye for now guys, take care.