A teacher is teaching toddlers about waste and reuse somewhere in a Lagos preschool. In a nursery outside of Seoul, across the Pacific, kids are analyzing their clothing and inquiring about the source of the materials. Teachers in Bolivia, Peru, and Argentina have submitted projects to an award program that didn’t exist fifteen years ago. A brochure was not distributed to any of these classrooms. Not one of their instructors received a cold email. All of them were reached by OMEP, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, without spending a dime on advertising. It’s important to comprehend how, as the response reveals something genuine about how ideas truly spread throughout society.
Launched in 2008, OMEP’s Education for Sustainable Development program was initially supported by the University of Gothenburg and operated within the framework of UNESCO’s Decade on Sustainable Development. The credibility of the institution was important. An NGO does not have to justify itself to a school administrator if it has formal partnerships with UNESCO and consultative status at the UN. That work is done by the affiliation. By coordinating its educational objectives with UNESCO’s Global Action Programme on ESD, OMEP effectively connected to the policy framework already in place in dozens of nations and joined discussions that were already taking place at the ministry level.
However, individual teachers in suburban Chile or rural Kenya cannot be reached by policy alignment alone. The national committee structure proved useful in this situation. Instead of distributing a uniform program from a central office, OMEP created regional chapters that could modify ESD principles to suit local conditions. This led to the creation of the “My Backyard Is the World” award in Latin America, a collaborative effort with ISA-Arcor that has been ongoing since 2018 and honors sustainable projects in seven nations. In addition to recognizing excellent work, the award gives educators an incentive to record and disseminate it. This documentation then returns to the larger network, providing other educators with tangible resources for learning.
Since the ESD Rating Scale is the least glamorous component of the puzzle, it merits special consideration as a growth mechanism. The scale was created in seven countries between 2011 and 2014: Chile, China, England, Kenya, Korea, Sweden, and the United States. It provides preschools with an organized method to assess their own sustainability practices in terms of social, environmental, and economic aspects. It is presented as a self-evaluation tool instead of a compliance tool, which is more important than it may seem. Teachers are not angry about it. They utilize it, discuss it with coworkers, and share it. The scale is available in several languages. It spreads because it is beneficial, and beneficial things spread on their own without advertising.
Similar principles underpin the operation of the resource bank OMEP, which is part of UNESCO’s GAP framework. Maintained and updated by members from almost seventy countries, this online database contains research, policy documents, lesson plans, and project descriptions. When a teacher is getting ready for the upcoming week, it’s the kind of tool that appears in a Google search at eleven o’clock at night. There’s no pitch. The information either aids or hinders. Perhaps more than any conference keynote or partnership announcement, the silent usefulness of these tools has expanded OMEP’s reach.
Nearly 500,000 children from 45 countries on six continents have participated in OMEP’s ESD programs as of the most recent count. The figure is both modest enough to be believable and big enough to be unexpected. It wasn’t a campaign that created it. It was a long accumulation of valuable resources, including tools that educators desired, awards that acknowledged genuine work, research that was disseminated through academic networks, and a framework that allowed local educators to take ownership of the program rather than merely participate in it. Anyone attempting to create something long-lasting can learn a lesson from that.
