Our experience and process on dealing with Global Goals.
During our university course “Social issues,social innovation and corporate responsibility” we,as a team, were first introduced to the Global Goals for sustainable development.As our project suggests, we should try and build up our own actions to deal with each of the Global Goals every team has chosen.The goal our team chose is the goal about zero poverty (goal no2) wich we combined to a zero food waste movement.
To do that, in the second week of our semester ,we had to search and learn a lot about what other people around the world did,not only to get inspired but to also get to know more about design thinking process and bringing ideas to life in a sustainable way.Medium platform and other sources helped us a lot in this process as long as many people share their projects through them.However, due to the fact that in the area we decided to work on there were a lot of obstacles such as laws,governmental involvement or other trade factors, we decided to differentiate our action ,taking into consideration the special characteristics of the Greek society and the deficiencies we considered as the roots of the problem.
To reach to the point were we decided that our project would be designed based on the Greek standards , we had firstly been through a design thinking process wich helped us figure out wich of our ideas and propositions could stand to real life in a sustainable way.For almost two weeks we worked with post-it stickers and different diagramms that would let us connect facts and
theoritical questions together . No matter how easy this process might seem,skipping it would cause a chaos for anyone trying to solve a problem.Being always able to check if your plans can meet your expectations and the global standards helps a lot in design thinking and problem solving.Appart from the problems we faced during this process,some good points emerged too.We had then put the fundamentals to start working on our project.
For the next two weeks,we had to interview people to get more insight on the problem.During this period we talked with more than 50 people of all ages.From students to businessmen and from kids to elder people ,all of them shared their opinions and beliefs on the topic as well as gave us feedback on the project that we,as a team were planning. It was a fact of a great importance, to us,to understand why people throw their food away and how this might be connected with other factors of their daily routines.
The truth is that at the end, we were surprised to realise that the reason people were passive on throwing away food was not just the fact that they thought that they wouldn’t have an impact on our society,but they were at most of the cases totally unaware of the actions and campaigns ran within their neighborhood. Those findings,helped us realise that the problem is not that there are not actions and campaigns,but that these actions are not efficiently promoted.Our goal ,then became much more clear.If people are bored to search how to help others and the actions taken are not popular enough , we should then try and spread awareness among people, by creating a website that would involve all actions taken,so that people would have them gathered and could choose the one they preffered.Moreover,our site would give to other organisations and companies the ability to join it.
Our team then, managed to find and collect some of the most preeminent actions ran not only in Athens,but all over Greece and included them in our website in order to call people to action.We then improved our site based in the feedback we got from people about our prototype.We removed the extra information that was not needed,we tried to make it easy to use and more apeeling.Also ,we give people the option to live chat with us .To promote our website we also created an instagram account where people can find us and get to know more about the “Share the Spare” website.To further promote it, we are going to ask the companies included to it, to share it through their social media accounts.
Below,you can follow our journey and learn get more insight about the procedure we followed through the semester:
Here is the link to our site “Share the Spare” :
Here is our instagram account :
Our team consists of :
Raed Raees (Christina Gourgoura)
Alkistis Joan (Alkistis Deli)
