Description

Description: The aim of the workshop is to consider the 4 basic things that we need in order to survive and think about people who don’t even have those necessities. Process: 1) Explain that ‘needs’ refer to the basic necessities of life without which it is difficult to survive such as air, food, water and that ‘wants’ refer to our various desires such as chocolates, CD’s, etc. 2) Set the context: Ask participants to imagine that they have received a really important phone call from the Head of their State, who explained, “We have a lot of problems in the world right now. If everyone all over the world used up as many resources as we do in the North, we would need another 4 planets! So we are going to conduct an experiment.” He/she has heard that the participants’ class (find out name of class at outset) is an extremely bright group of people so he/she thinks it would be a good idea to send all of them to a new planet. Explain that the new planet has a good atmosphere, so there is clean air for you all to breathe. There is gravity so you all will not float away and there are no aliens, so you don’t have to worry about that. You will be given 6 weeks supply of food and water. But you may be sent off for a few months, maybe a year. “Explain that is not much time, because you all will be leaving within the next 30 minutes. So what you need to do is pack your bags and think what you need to take. What is a need and what is a want? 3) Group work: Give each group a set of 40 cards. Explain they have 5 minutes to select 16 ‘needs’ that they believe are essential to survive on this new planet. Ask them to discuss as a team which are the ‘needs’ and which are the ‘wants’. Suggest that they make two different columns of the ‘needs’ and ‘wants’. 4) Then hand round envelopes of cards. Give the group around 10 minutes to get down to 16. Try and wait until all the groups have their 16 cards before going on. 5) When they have done this teams say, “I’ve got bad news to give, the Head of State said, the rocket ship is not big enough to fit you and your 16 things - so I’m afraid you have to cut them down to 8.” 6) When they have reduced the cards to 8 stick up the different cards on the board using the blue-tack. You will have on an average about 15 to 25 different cards on the board but they are allowed to take just 8 things. At this point you conduct a debate with the class and start losing a few cards by getting the class to vote to keep or lose the card. When you have got down to 8 cards, say, “You have done really well but suppose you were allowed to take just 4 cards and not 8?” 7) Carry on with the discussion until you get down to 4 cards. “The 4 cards that you will probably end up with are Water, Seeds, Fertile Soil and one other - usually chickens.” Then discuss the idea that for us life would be pretty miserable living with just these 4 basic things, but there are more than a billion people who don’t even have access to these 4 basic needs of life that the class just said that they all definitely need to survive. You can then have a discussion about what life would be like with or without these basics. 8) Finish class by explaining they don’t have to go on the rocket after all but what they do need to do is to stay back here and take care of this planet and make it a more sustainable place for the future generation to live on.

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