Like so much of our lives this year, the Trash Hero family meetings moved online, taking place virtually in November and December. After the first round of meetings, normally held in April / May, were cancelled, it was important to bring people together to reconnect and regroup – no matter what the circumstances. Our volunteers in Czech Republic, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Myanmar joined in-country sessions with Zoom or Google Meet; Trash Hero World also hosted two calls for volunteers in our global chapters.
We held breakout sessions to allow people to exchange stories from often very different experiences of lockdown; communicated important country and global updates; carried out training for different aspects of our programmes; and – as always – had some lively and fun discussions. As sessions had to be kept relatively short, we omitted our normal leaders’ academy. This will instead be made available as an online programme in 2021.
While it was impossible to reproduce the unique energy and interaction generated at an on-site meeting, the huge advantage of online sessions is that we were able to reach far more people, in far more places than ever before. This series of online family meetings engaged 276 participants in 18 different countries, compared with 197 people in 5 countries (in person) at the same time last year. Many of these participants had never had the chance to attend a family meeting previously, as we only offer them on site in countries with a large number of active chapters and to a limited number of representatives from each.
We are all hoping that we can move out of the current situation next year and return to the usual format to bring our Trash Hero family together; however we plan to keep the online sessions regardless as they proved to be a valuable tool to connect, motivate and share knowledge with our heroes around the globe.
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