School students from Tobolsk became winners of the Green Brush project

21 november 2022

On October 11-13, students from Tobolsk’s schools No. 5, 9 and 15 took part in the so-called Green Jamborees, interactive sessions dedicated to the topics of ecology and safety culture, organized by the Green Brush project and ZapSibNeftekhim LLC. Following the session’s offline program that included interactive lectures, master classes, and brainstorming sessions, students from grade 3 to 10 were asked to develop projects and make drawings for the nationwide Green Brush competition.

Tobolsk’s 15-year-old Nastya Kuchemyarova and 11-year-old Kira Dmitriyeva made it to the finals. Nastya presented a project dedicated to creating urban sculptures from recycled plastic. Together with her friends, she developed a series of sketches of such art objects featuring a Lapwing - a small bird granted special "personal" protection by ZabSibNeftekhim under the Territory of the Lapwing project - as their main character.

This trip was a very exciting experience for me, with its interesting excursions and new acquaintances. We all became very good friends and are staying in touch! Nastya Kuchemyarova noted. Tobolsk is a very beautiful city, but we also wanted to decorate it even more with sculptures of cute little lapwings that will help draw its residents’ attention to issues of wildlife conservation.

For her part, Kira Dmitriyeva proposed a beautification project for the city’s new potential tourist attraction, the Tobolsk Waterfalls.

The waterfalls were created in the 19th century by local merchant Syromyatnikov, Kira noted. I would love for the waterfalls to be beautified and decorated, so that our town can have yet another beautiful sight.

Elena Belskaya, Head of Department for Government Relations and Social and Economic Projects at ZapSibNeftekhim LLC, made the following comments after praising the winners: SIBUR has been implementing a broad range of social projects in Tobolsk and so it is gratifying to see that the underlying philosophy of many of them resonates with school-level projects. We will definitely consider the ideas that were presented here and will evaluate the feasibility of integrating them into our existing projects.

The awards ceremony was also attended by Zoya Fedotova, head of Young Professionals team, Elena Chernenko, head of the Special Projects and Events Department at the Volunteer Centers’ Association, Rashid Ismailov, Chairman of the Russian Ecological Society, and Nikolay Krivozertsev, CEO of EcoStandard group.

School students from Tobolsk, in partnership with ZapSibNeftekhim, have been taking part in Green Brush‘s events and competition programs for the third straight year. The finalists get to travel to Moscow to attend the Big Career Guidance Week where they get acquainted with various professions by meeting real specialists in the offices and at the laboratory of EcoStandard group, the project’s constant donor, visiting the Geology Museum, Kidburg, Power Plant 2, the Tretyakov Art Gallery as well as other exhibitions and educational sites in the capital. At the end of their cultural and educational program, the students get to take part in the opening ceremony of an exhibition of works of art on the theme of ecology and occupational safety, and get presented with their well-deserved awards at the event’s gala closing ceremony.

This year was packed with important and seminal events for us, noted Vera Kuzubov, President of the Green Brush Foundation. We won the We are together award, got included in the top 100 strong new ideas of the ASI, and became partners of the Education National Project. And in spring we did something very significant to us by implementing a project of holding a series of environment-themed events at TAFs in Rostov Oblast. In all, by 2022 our project had reached out to 22 regions, with more than 20 thousand schoolchildren taking part in it.

The awards ceremony ended with a festive tea party with a cake provided by the Green Brush in celebration of the project’s 5th anniversary. The aim of the Green Brush is to popularize such engineering professions as "ecologist", "geologist", "occupational safety specialist", while its main mission is to nurture environmental awareness and safety culture in school-age children.

The project’s volunteers have been working with schoolchildren in many Russian regions - from Kamchatka to Grozny. They organize mass-scale career guidance events known as Green Jamborees at schools and in cultural centers that include interactive lectures and quests followed by a thematic competition program.