Monday 12 October 2009

7 Weeks To Copenhagen

The Copenhagen 4's second preparation weekend at the UNICEF offices, London



The Copenhagen 4 getting involved with UNICEF's call to action for the Wave.


After a long week at school, we all arrived in London pretty tired. But after a good night’s sleep and some nice toast – according to Luke and Cressie – we were raring to get on with our jam-packed weekend’s worth of work.

We kicked off Saturday with some exciting, if still slightly vague news about the Forum, including where we will be staying in Copenhagen and details about the workshops. Finding out that we will be working from 8am to 9pm every day, excluding socialising time, was a bit of an eye-opener! It was also great to have a chat with a couple of the 2009 J8 team about their experience and the sort of things we can expect to happen at the Forum.

We were really lucky to receive media training and blogging and videoing tips from the UNICEF staff. Whilst Cressie had a tendency to laugh uncontrollably when in front of the camera – to the amusement of the rest of the team - I think we will be experts at expressing our key messages in the future. Exhausted and in need of food, we headed over to South Bank for a lovely meal and walked along the river, like true tourists!

On Sunday we had the opportunity to really work together as a team, and I can now safely say that the Copenhagen 4 is ready to face all the challenges that the world can throw at us! Firstly, we prepared for our meeting with David Kidney, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the Department of Energy and Climate Change, and thought about what we’d like to get out of the discussion. We are also planning to write a letter to Gordon Brown, praising him for committing to go to Copenhagen, whilst also seeing whether he would like to meet with us in the future.

The final thing to do was to start thinking about what we could do for the UK presentation that we will present to our Copenhagen partner school at the Forum. All plans are under wraps, but all I’ll say is that it includes a sheep (whatever Luke says!), dodgy accents and certain chaos!

Watch this space.

Katie x




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