Green Catalyst is a program to nurture and empower the youth to spread environmental awareness
among citizens and initiate actions which will help improve the environment in the city. Green Catalyst is
a leadership program that focuses on sustainability. Objective of the program is to prepare change
agents (Green Catalyst), who will spread awareness and sensitize other youths and community.
Under this program, student are selected from 15 colleges of different disciplines and trained
extensively on various environmental issues through different methods so that they understand the
complexity of current environmental issues. They are also given hands-on learning via field visits for
specific environmental issues to sensitize them about severity of the problem. To effectively spread
awareness they are empowered to disseminate information through different media so that they can
reach out to a larger audience in their surrounding and educational institute. Simultaneously they are
encouraged to organize public discussions and awareness programs through different media, and to
develop creative ways for disseminating information on environmental issues in community, colleges,
and schools. They are also trained to report the events and made responsible to cover their activities in
our bi-monthly magazine “Paryavaran Mitra”. The have created their own social network with Green
Catalyst website to share ideas, target the right people and raise awareness.
(http://greencatalyst.org.in/)
In year 2017-18, under this program, schools and villages are adopted for environmental awareness
throughout the year. This was done to strengthen environment awareness in schools and to give Green
Catalysts platform to develop leadership and ownership in them. 35 students were trained during this.
Students that were nominated last year (Green Catalyst) attended 4 training programs on various
environmental topics and 2 field visits. After training, they were part of 43 environmental awareness
programs throughout the year which included 7 public discussions, 23 community awareness programs,
and celebration of 13 environmentally important days. We have always encouraged them to organize
these events independently to develop managerial and leadership quality in them and they reciprocated
it very well.
This program is designed to provide platform to young people that are passionate about sustainability. It
will teach them how to learn and practice emerging leadership skills and knowledge. It will also develop
skills necessary to create effective awareness to achieve social, ecological and economic wellbeing in the
society.
