The Otesha Project (Australia): Cycling for Sustainability

A Brief History...

So far The Otesha Project (Australia) in 2008 has delivered our hilarious presentation on sustainability in over 60 schools, well over 6000 amazing youth and teachers during 3 bicycle tours. And the number keeps on growing especially with the tours that happen each year. YEAH!

What we do...

It's our dream to create awareness about issues, engage, and inspire youth to look at their daily choices in a more sustainable matter. To make them laugh and yet realise their own potential and ability to effect change in their world. We are able to do this through four major components:

• Removing the Blinders slideshow
• Introduction of The Otesha Project (Australia)
• Morning of Choices skit
• Inspiring Futures slideshow

Our Skit

At the heart of our presentation is the humorous, ever-changing, beautiful, and engaging Morning of Choices skit, which aims to inspire audiences to become inspired to take action that is sustainable. To take action that leads them to make sustainable consumer choices for a better world.

We identify, engage, and empower youth to look at our consumption practices within 6 major issues: Water, Clothing, Food, Media, Transportation, and Coffee/Chocolate. This is done with a variety of amazing driven youth who take on roles such as Careless Consumer, Action Addict, Mother Earth, and Human Props.

What's a human prop?

Human props create the scene as they morph their bodies into household objects and other important roles to set the scene for the wackiness of our play. The beauty of this play is that we don't need professional actors for the show just some passion for social and environmental sustainability and a willingness to get up there and have a go! And then before you know it BINGO that's you up on stage busting a move on the ethical cat walk or making ‘woosh' toilet flushing noises. Oh yeah, we have had some pretty impressive human toilets up there on stage!

The goodness factor

Some of the great things about our classroom based presentation is that it is: fun; creative; uses drama and humour to engage audiences; adaptable to suit the audience needs; and provides inspirational examples of participants who are doing their best to "walk the talk". On our bicycle tours the members are encouraged to make appropriate changes that they see fit so that they have more ownership over the skit and so that it's more applicable to that region.

Follow-up Workshops

The Otesha Project (Australia) follows up these performances with classroom based workshops on relevant sustainability issues. Examples of these include: fairwear, waste, ecological footprint, forest ecosystems, climate change, adbusting and many other issues that are unique to each region.

Motivational Presentations

We also provide motivational presentations that we do to engage youth about specific issues, talk about leadership, and inspiring small groups of people to think differently.

Booking a presentation

We encourage schools to get involved and contacting us about either booking a presentation or obtaining our school script for use within their schools. We love getting more connected with the community!