During the Global Leadership Skills course, all Full-time master’s students actively take part in an Action Learning Project. The purpose of this project is to enable the students to exercise their cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary leadership and teamwork skills to achieve significant results by contributing to the realization of one or more of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
In cross-program teams of 5 or 6 people who are diverse in many aspects (such as previous studies and cultural background), students will create a project that has societal impact.
Getting curious yet?
Below, some projects from the 2021-2022 cohort introduce themselves!
SCROFFEE
With our Action Learning Project, we aim to give used coffee grounds a second life in the form of natural, homemade body scrub for everyone. We have a partnership with the coffee shop Caffènation which provides us with sustainable packaging, a reusable glass bottle - and we will reuse their coffee grounds waste and distribute them to people in Antwerp to make their own body scrub with it.
https://www.instagram.com/scr.offee/
WASTERBUSTER!
We are the Wasterbusters! As part of our ALP project, we are building a community of ploggers in Antwerp to battle plastic pollution. Plogging is a combination of jogging with picking up litter (merging the Swedish verbs plocka upp (pick up) and jogga (jog).
Join us by downloading the WePlog app and following our community run_to_clean_antwerp.
https://www.instagram.com/run_to_clean_antwerp/
Eco Fashion
To support responsible consumption (SDG 12) through impactful collaborations (SDG 17). We proudly have established a partnership between AMS, de Kringwinkel and HNST Jeans in order to reduce (textile) waste in the fashion industry contributing to circular fashion.
De Kringwinkel’s donation box has been set up at AMS to donate all types of clothes, shoes, accessories, and household textiles. De Kringwinkel will resell these textiles in their shops to support a social cause while all jeans will be recycled by HNST Jeans into “the world's most sustainable jeans”.
Recypts
As a part of AMS Action learning projects, We provide solutions to reduce normal paper receipts (SDG12) in retail which are harmful to the climate (SDG13). We are currently in collaboration with recyclable paper suppliers and have also found digital receipts solutions (printing on demand). To make a bigger and long-lasting impact, we are still looking for retail stores that would like to work with us and eventually build partnerships (SDG17) with the paper suppliers/ digital companies. If you are interested in being our partner, don't hesitate to contact us via email (xinwei.wang@student.ams.ac.be) or Instagram. Looking forward to hearing from you!
Ecotell
In our project Ecotell we wrote a short book about Thomas and his journey about plastics in the ocean. We read and presented our short book in various elementary school classes and open-sourced it, so that teachers around Belgium can download it. The goal is to raise awareness about the topic but also to allow children to dive into the topic in an easy and understandable way, without making them fearful of the future.
If you have any parents, children, teachers or other friends that might be interested in your network, we would be more than happy if you can share our story with them! 😊.
Reusr
We are Reusr, a motivated ALP team that created a digital map with coffee bars in Antwerp that give a discount when you come in with your own reusable coffee cup. With this project, we want to reduce the usage of disposable cups and have an impact on SDG 12. We aim to encourage people to use a reusable cup, when getting a coffee at the AMS coffee machines or at one of their favourite coffee bars in Antwerp! Do you want to discover our digital map? Scan or click on the QR code.
Wrap It
Our aim is to stimulate the use of more environmentally ways to package your lunch and reduce plastic as well as food waste. Next to that, we want to encourage people to bring healthy food from home.
How can AMS students help support us?
1. Follow our Instagram page.
2. Download our recipe and make your own food wrapper
3. Share a picture of your sustainable food wrapper on Instagram by using the hashtag #_wrap.it
Not sure you can make your food wrapper all by yourself? Then join us in one of our upcoming workshops. 😉
Books & Friends
We are Books & Friends and with this project we aim to connect students through books by spreading the joy of reading. We’ve created bookshelves that function as mini-libraries in multiple coffee-bars in Antwerp where you can exchange the books that you loved and have read already for a new one! :-)
Interested? Go check out our Instagram-page! P.S.: there is a nice give-away in the running, so maybe you can still participate? :)
SoulMat
SoulMat’s mission is to reduce mattress waste in Belgium while creating circularity within the student community in Antwerp. This way, we contribute to SDG 12: Responsible Consumption. Together with our partner Kringwinkel, we collect your used mattress at your place free of charge, to give it a second life. The clean mattresses will find a new home. And don’t worry about the unusable ones, these will be recycled.
If you are interested in our project, be kind to fill our survey in the QR code embedded or email us!
