The Greenheart Project has launched a worldwide Green Power Poster Contest for young people of all ages. So send in your art designs for posters, postcards and flash animated web designs!
Use your design skills to inform people about the Greenheart Project. Draw, paint, sketch, or use Macromedia Flash to design an eye-catching public poster on the theme of GREEN POWER. The winning artwork will also be made into flags for the first ships which will be launched in mid 2007.
Greenheart is calling for images and art designs which visually explore the many facets of green power; including sustainable shipping, fair trade, alleviation of world poverty and the sharing of skills and technologies. Entry is free and artwork from children aged two, right up to young adults will be accepted. Both individual and group entries are welcome and prizes will be given in all age and art design categories. For full competition details go to www.greenheartproject.org. The deadline for entries is 31st March, 2006.
A small international not for profit organisation, the Greenheart Project has a very big idea. Based in Tokyo, Greenheart’s mission is to design and build a revolutionary wind and solar-powered boat to serve sustainable development and green power. Greenheart’s technologically advanced, green and cheap to build ships will make a huge difference to sea trade and in particular, marginalized, struggling and impoverished communities. The proposed Greenheart fleet of inexpensive, environmentally friendly sailing ships will also enable traditional sea-faring countries and communities in the third world to trade directly with their more affluent neighbours. The project is part of a creative collaboration supported by organizations such as Oxfam, Friends of the Earth International, Care International, Climate Care Europe/UK, Fairtrade Federation USA and individual green power experts and advocates.
“A project like this has the potential to change so many lives in developing countries, and to also inspire and educate people all over the world,” says Chris Kozak, Greenheart’s spokesperson. And inspiring people is exactly what the Greenheart Project has in mind with their Green Power Poster Contest. The contest encourages young people from all around the world to share their vision of a clean and sustainable future through posters, postcards and Macromedia Flash animations.
Gavin Allwright, the Education Director of Greenheart explains the Greenheart Project Poster Contest in this way, “We feel that it is really important to include the vision of children in the project. We want to give young people a stage on which to present their vision of a peaceful, sustainable and co-operative world. Through their artistic expression, we can encourage them to participate in the need for change in the wider community as well as in their personal lives.” The project aims to ”open the door to all entrants and their communities to the concepts and approaches of the project. This also includes encouraging young volunteers in the future to participate and to have a sense of ownership…
Through the art work, we hope to send inspirational and challenging messages to the judges, hundreds of groups that we are working with and to thousands of visitors to the website. In the near future the art work will be seen by visitors to our ships events and by the communities we visit.
The main idea is for participants to give us their vision of ‘Green Power’ and to reinforce that with 50-100 words explaining the inspiration behind their art work.”
Asked about the art of very young children, Allwright responds enthusiastically: “Obviously the work of young children will have less of a grasp on the green power concepts, but their imagination, passion and clarity of vision are fundamental to dealing with the local and the global environmental challenges that are facing all of us. We need to think in innovative, organic ways and our children and youth are the well-spring, the vanguard of change. For older participants these are concepts/pointers/touch stones that can connect our project’s themes to their images. However, they can incorporate and interpret these themes how they choose.”
Greenheart is the brainchild of Pat Utley, Greenheart’s Director. Pat has dreamt of returning green powered sailing ships to the trading routes of the seas in an inspiring, environmentally sustainable and responsible way. Having spent his working life sailing, engineering and in aid projects, Pat felt that the time was right to garner funding and to launch this unique enterprise.
“The idea springs from the combined experiences of my life so far. One of my first sailing experiences was aboard a replica coastal trading schooner built in 1980…I enjoyed that a lot, but it was not until 15 years later that the Greenheart idea began to hatch.”
Permanently based in Japan, Utley comments; “Japan is well behind our other two ‘Ports of Call’ (North Sea, Seattle/Vancouver) in terms of Environmental sympathies and International awareness. However, both of these areas are blossoming now…and seem to offer…fertile ground for pitching a project. We want to sail under a flag that will be welcome everywhere and that represents our ideals of Environmental respect and International Co-operation.”
By combining both charitable and profitable aspects while embracing the principles of environmental protection, sustainability and fair trade, Greenheart will offer a very public model of a self-funding, respectable institution. “We hope to inspire people and organisations around the world to re-think the boundaries of business and of international aid. In time, we intend to build a fleet of non-polluting sailing cargo ships for use in poverty alleviation programs around the world.”
The educational activities of the Greenheart Project will be directed at three different groups using three distinct methods:
1. Trainees from impoverished coastal communities with sailing traditions will be hired as crew and given on-the-job training;
2. Greenheart will maintain an educational website directed at school-aged children. “We expect to attract teachers and students in the fields of Science, Geography and Social Studies with an interactive, real-time window on our operations and activities.”;
3. “We will also inform the general public in all of the ports that the Sailing Vessel Greenheart visits. By inviting the people aboard during our port calls, we hope to propagate the idea that sustainability is a viable option for an enterprise that is commercial, charitable, or both.”
Imagine a modern-day peace fleet: Not built for the defence forces or financed by the military, but rather managed and supported by all the nations of the earth in a global act of friendship. Imagine the impact socially and culturally of a project of this magnitude and the co-operation required to maintain it. It is a visionary and utopian idea that Pat Utley has nursed for some years and it has something of the wonder and hope of childhood in it.
And given that it’s all about a brighter and more earth-friendly future, who better than children and young people to create the images for the Greenheart Project?
Greenheart GREEN POWER
POSTER DESIGN CONTEST
www.greenheartproject.org
For further information contact Greenheart’s Education Director Gavin Allwright at: gavall@greenheartproject.org
