Fighting bullying, not bullies
It been almost a year since Project I/AM was introduced as a kick off of the large national conversation on bullying among youth. It involved 620 Participants aged 14-28 from all over the country, 1144 U-Reporters on board to make their voice heard, 10 winning teams bringing a change back home. This project came in response to one of the most common children’s issues in Malaysia - school bullying. In the past years, number and severity of reported bullying cases rose drastically and more than 70% of people claim to have been a victim themselves at one point of their lives.
Project I/AM Inisiatif Anak Malaysia intended to educate young people to be change-makers in their community, to be aware of the issue and to help others to withstand the abuse together. U-Report traveled to 5 states: Kuala Lumpur, Sabah, Kelantan, Penang and Sarawak to conduct 7 hour workshops to spark conversations about the issue and creative problem solving, where teams could suggest their own projects to stop bullying. 10 finalist teams received grants of RM 1000 to bring their projects further and 5 finalists received additional RM 5000 grants to implement their solutions. In just one week participants reached out to more than 900 students involving 93 youth volunteers to create an impact. These projects consisted of creating an awareness about bullying and teaching children the ways to protect themselves, without harming the bullies. It also raised the issues of bystanding and not reporting the accidents. Programs included various activities, talks by invited speakers, games and challenges to encourage children to recognize the issue when it happens in their surroundings and react in the right way knowing to whom they can trust in safely addressing the issue. The idea was to empower students and youth to become leaders in addressing the issue, owning it and providing solutions for the change as well as enabling others to pass on this leadership to their peers to ensure continuity of public action to fight against bullying.
#StandTogether Campaign
The #StandTogether campaign by SP Setia and R.AGE was launched last year with the aim of ending bullying in schools through kindness. It successfully called for a National Kindness Week in over 750 schools across the country in the first week of April; with partners such as Unicef Malaysia, Digi, Petrosains, Teach For Malaysia, 100% Project and Study Hub Asia helping in the effort.
With help from the #StandTogether competition, students across Malaysia are implementing their own ideas to make their schools a kinder place. Around 120 schools sent in their kindness proposals and RM30,000 grant fund was distributed to the 30 best of them, while the top 10 would also get a celebrity school visit. Regardless of competition results, many schools decided to carry on with their kindness projects anyway.
#StandTogether 2.0 is about to make a come back in April 2019 with even more profound campaigns, talks and projects. And for now, we are getting ready for the Youth Talk which will be happening this August, uniting representatives from the winning schools to continue conversation on bullying and encouraging even more pledges for standing up against the issue. Check out more at https://standtogether.my/
