On June 23rd, 2023, Heritage International School was named a Build the Change Showcase School. Only 25 schools globally have been chosen to join the new initiative due to their hard work on climate education.

The initiative is driven by the LEGO Group’s sustainability team as part of their Build the Change program and Take Action Global. The LEGO Group’s Build the Change program is all about giving children a voice and allowing them to express their hopes and ideas for a better future using the power of learning through play.

The showcase schools submitted their work for the past year and met extensive criteria, including a school-wide commitment to climate education and student solutions. The selected schools are based in Belgium, Colombia, Egypt, Honduras, India, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Moldova, Morocco, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, UAE, USA and Venezuela, covering 5 continents.

Tatiana Popa, Heritage Deputy Academic Director: “In December 2022, TAG in collaboration with LEGO launched the School to Home LEGO challenges. As a Climate Action School, our school benefitted from these mini-challenges, too. We included each monthly challenge in our International Heritage Herald newsletters to families, as well as to our educators, and students of various ages completed them either in class or at home. We submitted photos of their artworks to LEGO. All the challenges referred to sustainability and helped our learners develop their critical thinking, collaborative and entrepreneurial skills. We are proud to have  been selected as a Build the Change Showcase School!”

For one year the Build the Change Showcase Schools will be working closely with the LEGO Group and Take Action Global. The schools will be able to learn, work together virtually across borders, inspire their peers with their ingenuity, work on challenges, and create and disseminate their own learning materials. Students will be able to work on prototypes of their ideas for impact which will be showcased by the LEGO Group and Take Action Global.

David Pallash, Global Programs and Partnerships, LEGO Group: “The team has worked with Take Action Global for a few years now so we are incredibly excited to take the partnership to the next level, further supporting schools in the network with a Learning through Play approach to Sustainability and amplifying more ideas from children around the world across both TAG’s and the LEGO Group’s platforms. Children have such incredible ideas that must be heard.”

Koen Timmers, Take Action Global: “Youth has an incredible potential to create new things. If we allow them to engage in sustainability discussions and solutions, they can use their skills to craft solutions for global threats like climate change. During the past years we noticed that by putting teachers and students in a global network, allows them to exchange ideas and even replicate good practices. We at Take Action Global are very excited to collaborate with LEGO to give teachers and students the opportunity to learn, share and take positive actions.”

Take Action Global is an education nonprofit based in the USA, working on climate education which is reaching 3,400,000 teachers and students across 152 countries. Take Action Global’s initiatives include projects, a full year program and an online live event. All initiatives aim to help students learn about the climate crisis in authentic ways and disseminate solutions through an online platform.