Operation R.O.F (Reefs are our future) Proposal
This is the proposal Pak Mo and myself came up with for the free diving certification company. I hope you enjoy it.
Operation reefs are our future is a project created by high schoolers in Green School Bali to learn about marine conservation. Our ultimate goal is to build our own artificial reef in Indonesia.
Everybody in our team are high school students who have opted out of our normal program to join LEAP academy, an offshoot program of Green School that focuses only on project based learning and hands on activity. We all get six weeks as a team to work on whatever project we decide, at the end of our brainstorm period we finally decided on a reef restoration project on account of the importance of reefs and because the issue affects us locally.
We are currently exploring the opportunity to work together with eqUILIBRIA hotels, who are building a new resort in Gili Gede that has sustainability at the core of their operations. One of their main goals is to provide marine education to both their guests and the people living on island. They have approached Green School with the desire to involve the students in their plans. With this in mind, we are preparing a proposal to design and help build an artificial reef using bio rocks powered by solar energy.
We know that we are inexperienced high school students, and us personally do not yet have the expertise required for a project of this scale. But we are learning more every day and have a very solid network of experts who will be both aiding us in our project, and imparting important knowledge on us as we develop the stages of the project.
At this moment we are in the learning stage, creating an understanding of the complexity of this project. By reaching out to our teachers and outside organizations, we’re learning about marine biology, reef conservation and the different methods to create an artificial reef. During this stage we also need to attain certain skills to aid us in the project, like how to perform a reef check, or how to freedive. The other part of this stage is talking to the experts and understanding the limitations and opportunities as we move forward.
The next stage is going to Gili Gede to inspect the reefs and make an analysis of the situation. We will then be talking to people on Gili Gede who are knowledgeable on the subject and we will create a series of reef transects, reef checks with bioindicators and coral bleaching survey.
By the end of our six week programme, we will aim to create a proposal for eqUILIBRIA resort to create a bio rock in their reef, this benefits them because one of their goals is to educate people on reef conservation.
If it gets approved, we will then coordinate with Green School to organize the final stage which will be to build a solar powered bio rock to take to Gili Gede and plant in eqUILIBRIA resort’s reef some time in the future. This part is outside the scope of our current Leap programme.
Communication Strategy
Once confident with our newly acquired knowledge, we would like to share what we learned with Kul Kul Connection students (local students from Green School’s free after school English programme) so that we can get them to care about the ocean. Hopefully we’ll get enough interest so a few students can join us on the building of the artificial reef.
Leap Academy is very active in communicating all that we do. We have a Medium Publication where we’ll be writing about all that we do. We will share everything on Instagram and we will talk about it in our recently launched podcast.
We’ll also get in contact with Green School’s communications department so that they share our stories with our community (through the weekly newsletter) as well as with their larger network (through social media and their quarterly international newsletter).
