A message from Green SOS

honglake

Dear Sir or Madam:

My name is Kui Li, the new Facilitator General (namely former Secretary General) of GreenSOS. I am now writing you the letter to inform you of the present work and arrangements of GreenSOS after long-time losing in touch with you and your organizations.

I was selected as the Facilitator General of GreenSOS this spring, and with the support from the EarthCorps, I am now in Seattle, the U.S. and having a half year International Training Project about environmental restoration hand-on skills and environmental education with many young people from other developing countries. We do the restoration work in the national parks or some reserve areas, and the main work is trail building, trail maintenance and invasive plant remove in order to protect the local environment My experience at EarthCorps will not only be a great opportunity for GreenSOS to learn the advanced and professional training from the U.S., but also a great enforcement for me and my colleagues at GreenSOS to communicate more globe-mindedly with other international green youth. In fact, for me and GreenSOS, the opportunity from EarthCorps is a consequence from you and your organizations’ generous and continuous help to our organization in the past 5 years.

In the next half year, the main projects of GreenSOS will be GreenSOS Fund, GreenSOS Monthly Forum Project, Sichuan Rural Environmental Education Training and Capacity Building Project, and Chengdu Green Map Project and many other projects. There are some brief introductions about these activities: (Many other activities could be found on our website as: www.greensos.org.)
GreenSOS Fund: Our fund will keep on granting funds to green college student organizations to support their environmental protection activities. Thank ECOLOGIA and the Asia Foundation for your donation to this project. Your supports had ensured the sustainable progress of GreenSOS Fund and many developed student grantees of GreenSOS Fund.

Monthly Forum Project: In the later half year of 2006, with the spirit and principles of Earth Charter, this project will focus on sustainable living and responsible consumption among young people. Deforestation, Biodiversity Reduction, Water Pollution, Air Pollution, Solid Waste Disaster, Energy Crisis and Climate Change-all these emergent environmental problems are bad consequences from unsustainable living and irresponsible consumption. Monthly Forum Project tries to organize discussions and encourage actions among young people to discovery the close relations between their consumption choices and environment deterioration. Thank CEPF and ECOLOGIA for the donations of the Monthly Forum Project.
Sichuan Rural Environmental Education Training and Capacity Building Project: This is cooperative project co-operated by 5 local or international environmental NGOs in Chengdu areas: Partnerships for Community Development（PCD）, Chengdu Urban Rivers Association（CURA）, Roots & Shoots environmental education program, ECOLOGIA Sichuan Project and Green Students Organizations Society（GreenSOS）. Many of the trainees of this project are college students once trained by GreenSOS Monthly Forum Project. GreenSOS is a very important resource organization for this project for our long time experience to help young students for their environmental protection activities. (More information about this project could be found at http://www.greensos.org/news_list.php?id=182)
Chengdu Green Map Project: Green Map is a recent international initiative to encourage local people to re-discover both the environmentally and culturally friendly visiting sites in their cities or communities. Chengdu is a city owning famous environmental and cultural resource and places, and also abundant of lovely but less famous green places. One Chengdu college student initiated the idea to make a Green Map for Chengdu. That’s the start of this project. Now, with the great work of many college volunteers, GreenSOS is right on the way to print the first version of Green Map of Chengdu. Almost all the locations of environmental organizations’ offices, governmental environment agencies, and universities with green students groups at Chengdu have been marked on the Green Map. Our next step is to mark more interesting green places on the map for both local residents and visitors to use the map as a green guideline.
Bird Watching project: The initial intention of this project is to popularize the bird watching activities and to arouse the people’s interests and consciousness to protect these species at Chengdu, a place is rich in species of birds, but also an area has rare bird watching activities among the public. How could this mission be initiated through our program? Since the students are the most active and enthusiastic group, our strategy is to first introduce the birding activity to this group. This project can train leaders of environmental protection organization, accumulate information of birds‘ diversity in Chengdu, improve citizen‘s consciousness of environmental protection.

Earth View Environmental Protection Video Southwest Center project: In 2002, GreenSOS applied to be the Southwest Center of the Earth View Environmental Protection Video project. The aim of this project is to share good environmental protection videos with many green student groups and other environmental NGO or other organizations or individuals who just need the resources of these Earth View videos. This project will still keep on going with the cooperation of Sichuan University Environmental Protection Association.

Also, many thanks to GGF, New Path Foundation and lots of other organizations and their respectable leaders for all the various help to GreenSOS.
I will go back China and continue my work for GreenSOS this December. During my absence, my colleague Ms. Liu Yang (weneedwaterandair@gmail.com), the former GreenSOS Secretary General will replace my work temporarily, and a new colleague of mine, Mr. Chen Gang (pepole79@gmail.com) will work as the assistant of Ms. Liu Yang to deal with both administration and project operation work for GreenSOS. Therefore, if you have any questions or information for GreenSOS, you are encouraged to connect both of them for sharing.

Thank you once again for your great supports and encouragements to GreenSOS!
Yours sincerely,
Kui Li
Facilitator-General
GreenSOS

Connecting information:
Liu Yang: Tel 135-6899-5854, 86-28-8541-0228
Chen Gang: Tel 138-8061-1828, 86-28-8541-0228
Office Address: West2-14, Zhu Lin Department, Sichuan University, Chengdu, Sichuan Province.
Website: www.greensos.org