The holistic education of our students is a core value here at Institut Montana Zugerberg. As part of that, our students engage in various charity projects. For example, our fourth graders of the Bilingual Elementary School who support the charity project «Greenlamp» with their class advisor Christin Büscherfeld.
Zugerberg, June 2018
Since 2012, Greenlamp has reached over one million women and touched the lives of five million people in rural Ethiopia. Greenlamp’s mission is to empower women and girls through education, health care and technology, enabling them to bring social and economic change to their own communities. A subproject is solar lamps in suitcases, which the midwives take with them when they are called to births in remote areas where there is a lack of natural light and infrastructure.
The Greenlamp project was chosen because our former BE teacher Joanna Boyd has been involved in charitable work for a long time, providing our students with valuable input and background knowledge. As a start to this fundraiser, Joanna Boyd explained the mission of Greenlamp and showed how the solar cases worked.
Ambitious donation target
The donation target was set at 830 francs to finance at least 10 solar cases (10 head torches and 1 vacuum pump). The students set out with much enthusiasm and dedication to reach this sum. They explained the importance of the project to numerous teachers and administrative staff at Institut Montana and in their private environment, and were thus able to receive their first donations. Before the bake sale, everybody was busy baking cakes and muffins, which proved to be very popular with the numerous buyers. To promote the bake sale, the kids made posters that were displayed everywhere in the school.
In April, Joanna Boyd visited the class again to collect the money. She also told the students of her last journey to Ethiopia as a Greenlamp ambassador, when she visited midwives. Overall, the impressive sum of CHF 1′108.30 was collected. Those children who collected more than CHF 100,00 were given a Greenlamp T-shirt and each child received a donation certificate. The children were very proud of the sum they achieved.
