GIVE: United Nations Climate Actionists

Creating the Spark for Sustainable Development

We’re so proud to be recognized by the United Nations Climate Change Conference as Climate Actionists – those around the world rising to the challenge that climate change presents.

This video highlights our eco-bricks projects in the rural village of Sop Chem, Laos. Alongside the community, we’ve diverted more than 30,000 plastic bottles from landfills, open dumps and waterways, packed the bottles with inorganic waste and sand, and repurposed them as eco-bricks to build freshwater tanks, primary school classrooms, and teacher dormitories.

The story is told by David Boongullaya (P’Dave), our Regional Coordinator in Southeast Asia. P’Dave embodies GIVE’s commitment to asset-based community development around the world, which combines local resources and knowledge with innovative and sustainable techniques. When identifying projects, we listen to our host community members and unite them around issues that inspire collective action. Together, we embark on projects that promote local leadership, ownership and resilience.

Hear from P’Dave himself:

“We come in here asking them: What are you missing in this community? What can we help fix? What can we brainstorm together, and how can we work through this?” That’s the mentality that David Boongullaya, part of GIVE Volunteers, takes when he comes to a community to help it develop. The organization helps communities grow sustainably by building dorms for teachers, schools for students, water tanks for the communities and more with eco-bricks, which are made from plastic trash that support concrete. That’s just one of the ways that GIVE helps communities become more resilient and adaptive to climate change. “This is a spark that we want to set,” says David, about partnering with communities and teaching them about sustainable development. “This is the light that we want to shine.”

See GIVE featured United Nations’ COP28UAE Actionist!