I'm now at the end of week 4 of my LIA here in Mexico. Over these past few weeks, my project has gone from a vague idea to a concrete, detailed plan. I'll try to explain in this blog how it happened.

I've been working on my project with Laurence (another scholar) and an organisation called Huerto Roma Verde. Huerto is this incredible garden space right in the centre of Mexico City. It organises events, workshops, markets, a cafe and various socio-environmental projects. In a busy city neighbourhood, it is a space to reconnect with nature and learn again how to give it the respect it deserves.

The organisation asked Laurence and I to organise two 'artivism' workshops. This, we learnt, meant using crafts and arts in order to have an impact on a wider concern - that of the climate crisis. Within this proposal, we had plenty of scope to do what we thought would work best. Therefore, using the design thinking methodologies taught to us by MakeSense, we spent a lot of time 'ideating' what we could do.

By this, I mean that we considered as many different options as possible. We probably came up with around 30 different ideas in the end, which we then narrowed down according to two primary factors. The first was whether the option was feasible - whether we could practically achieve it in the time and space we had available to us. This ruled out activities like massive land art pieces that would probably require another month at least! The second was whether the option would have a real impact.

In the end, one option in particular seemed to stand out for us. Since we both believed strongly in the power of education, we felt actually the best way to have an impact would be to teach kids about climate change. We wanted to raise awareness of climate change in the younger generation in a fun and engaging way. This might inspire them to take further action in the future.

Once we had made this decision, we continued 'ideating' in order to decide exactly what activities to run in the workshops. We came up with a list of 8, which we then shared with Huerto Roma Verde. They loved them! Together we managed to refine our ideas and come up with a concrete plan for the workshop. The kids will be building dens, learning about climate change through science experiments, making a mural about global warming, listening to stories and constructing bug hotels. Hopefully, it'll be a really fun day!

With regard to my leadership development, I think there's two things that stuck out to me this week. The first is that I learnt how to coordinate a big group of volunteers. I've never had to communicate in this sort of manner before - in the past, I've only led small groups of people my own age. However, I enjoyed sending messages out and reorganising things within the group. It helped me to feel more confident navigating this kind of task in future.

The second thing that I learnt is how to effectively hold a meeting. Initially, our meetings with Huerto didn't feel particularly productive - we would discuss our thoughts about something, but then not reach any clear conclusions. I spoke to some of my fellow scholars about this, and they suggested setting an agenda. Though I never actually explicitly said it, I began to create an agenda in my head. I felt like I was much more organised because of this. It meant I could draw conversation back to the necessary issues when it began to drift off topic. In today's meeting, for example, we were able to decide precisely on the nature of the activities, how we would involve our volunteers, and what we need to buy.

I have really enjoyed these two weeks, though they certainly have been difficult at times! Now that I've firmly decided what our project will look like, I'm really excited to see the final results next week!