Green Your School Competition (GYS) focuses on the environmental education and engagement of high school students (12-18) and increasing the professional capacity of teachers.

The project was launched in 2007 in China. By end of 2010, more than 1500 teachers attended our teacher training workshops and more than 12,000 students from 1129 schools took part in the Competition nationwide. The project has an outreach of more than 800, 000 people through activities delivered by competition participants. The grand final competitions were filmed and broadcasted by our TV media partner CCTV (China Central Television) 10, and Travel TV with a total audience number of about 24.33 million. In 2010 it was our first time to do an on-line grand final and we received 2,753,336 votes from 1,215,275 registered users.

So far the project has been running in 14 cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Xiangang, Chengdu, Tianjin, Chongqing, Kunming, Ningbo, Hangzhou, Foshan, Dongguan and Hongkong. GYS 2010 was rolled out in 8 cities among the list.

GYS provides students opportunity to engage with practical environmental learning by coming up with imaginative solutions to improve schools’ environmental performance. The students then lead the way in implementing their ideas, gaining skills in decision-making and project management. Through dedicated training workshops, teachers develop an awareness of different teaching methods that can be adopted in communicating climate change as well as knowledge of how to encourage students’ creative involvement.