Creating Awareness the Fun Way: Comic Strips

“Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.” – Albert Einstein

When over 20 young changemakers come together, the results are beyond phenomenal. We urge you to scroll down to check out the wonderful creators who inspired and curated these comic strips 🙂

Project Focus: UN SDG 3, 4, 5, 11, 13

Inspiration:

Combating social issues starts with creating social awareness around them. Social awareness is the development of one’s emotional intelligence and the modern tech-savvy era calls for interesting ways to tap into this emotional intelligence. Comics were always seen as a great medium for storytelling, entertainment and satire. Lately, it’s also turned into a powerful method to raise awareness and lead campaigns about various social issues. Thus, our young ChangeWarrior tribe decided to empower their peers and other socially-conscious adults on prevalent issues through enlightening and engaging comic strips.

“I believe that humor is a means that most people can relate to and thus by creating a comic strip, the issue of climate change can be successfully portrayed.” – Jiana Lakdawala

The problem at hand:

Awareness about social issues helps individuals to learn to lend an ear to the ideas and desires of other people. Awareness of social issues and having resources to face them is an important factor that every individual should possess to be able to live as one with society. It helps people understand and look at the world from a humanitarian point of view, and helps understand how injustices affect them. However, many people find these issues and solutions difficult to comprehend.  Our Young Changemakers decided to incorporate comic strips into their social impact project. The Comic Strip Project by our young Changemakers used comic strips as a medium of social awareness that is both simple to create and understand. It was aimed to empower young children and women with knowledge on various aspects of digital education, mental health and reproductive health, climate, and financial literacy.

“We made a series of Comic strips which showcased different scenarios of daily events related to Climate Change. We created these Comics to make them easily accessible and educate people on Climate change in an interactive manner.” – Kapish Sharma

Team-storming to Action Plan

Here’s how the project panned out through a series of steps:

1. Knowledge Collection: The Climate Warriors got acquainted with the primary concepts related to the topic they have decided to work on. They interacted with experts from the field and understood what aspects of the knowledge must be dissipated through the comic strips.
2. Fieldwork: The students engaged in a fieldwork session with young women and children, to gauge their understanding of the topics and to pass on awareness through workshops. 
3. Brainstorming: The teams brainstormed how they could design the comic strip. They  focused on deciding a set of common characters to include in the comics and to ensure that the right message is conveyed to the readers without becoming too boring or too overwhelming for them. They agreed to remove cartoonish images, fictional creatures, and talking animals from our comics because such elements would  make the comics too childish. 

4. Creating Comic Strips: The ChangeWarriors finally put their knowledge, experience, and creativity together to bring the comic strips to life.

“My comic strips are for families in general. They serve as instructional guides to teach the readers about how to  open bank accounts, how to do mobile transactions with Paytm and GooglePay, as well as how to budget and  keep track of expenses” – Soham Joshi

Project Impact:

The project was definitely a resounding success. Not only did the ChangeWarriors manage to break down a complex topic into simple, easy-to-digest parts for the audience, but they also managed to hold the attention of the recipients.The comic strip allowed them to engage with a wider audience and the humorous and eye-catching style will definitely impart their message effectively to the reader. It explained concepts with simple, and sometimes humorous, scenarios that  did not overwhelm or bore the readers. They were able to pass on the information and make the students more aware of certain existing issues and injustices in our country through comic strip scenarios. 

Our thoughtful Changemakers Tribe:

• Aashima Keswani, The International School, Bangalore
• Aishita Tekriwal, Ahmedabad International School, Ahmedabad
• Alexander Israel, Chennai Public School, Chennai
• Anshika Paliwal, Genesis Global School, Noida
• Arpit Mittal, Woodstock School, Uttarakhand
• Aryaveer Bhargava, Modern School Delhi
• Ayan Hooda, Christ Church School, Mumbai 
• Divij Butte, Pawar Public School, Mumbai
• Inayat Sethi, Woodstock School, Uttarakhand
• Jiana Lakdawala, The Cathedral and John Connon School, Mumbai
• Kapish Sharma, Bliss International School, Pune
• Kshitij Mittal, Goldcrest International, Mumbai
• Lakshya Gupta, G.D.Goenka School, Delhi
• Madhvik Sharma, G.D.Goenka School, Delhi
• Naail Narayan, Shri Ram School, Delhi
• Nayanika Pande, Thakur College, Mumbai
• Nandini Rastogi, Unison World School, Uttarakhand
• Niya Bansal, Aaryans International School, UP
• Pawani Mishra, Maharishi Patanjali Vidya Mandir, Prayagraj 
• Rajveer Singh, St. George’s College, Uttarakhand
• Ritvik Gawda, Bangalore International Academy, Bangalore
• Ritwik Mallavarapu, Gear Innovative Intl. School, Bangalore
• Saanvi Agrawal, Strawberry Fields, Chandigarh
• Sabarigirish Manikandan, BVM Global Bollineni Hillside, Chennai
• Sanskriti Nanda, Mother Mary’s school, Delhi
• Shlok Narvekar, Khar Education Society, Mumbai
• Siddh Vora, Garodia International Centre For Learning, Mumbai
• Siddharth Innani, Kissan International School, Maharashtra
• Soham Gupta, Wilson College, Mumbai
• Soham Shah, Dhirubhai Ambani International School, Mumbai
• Soham Shreenivas Joshi, Greenwood High, Bangalore
• Srinjay Mukherjee, DPS Monarch International School, Qatar
• Zurie Aboobacker, JBCN International School, Mumbai
• Siya Maisheri 
• Parth Bishnoi
• Daksh Aggarwal
• Dhakshina Shree,
• Harshil Nainani
• Heaven Shah

The Global Challenges and Social Justice Program by TribesforGOOD deals with many cutting-edge themes and global issues. Hundreds of ChangeWarriors have made a positive impact in their community and built their profile through the program. They have gathered new skills, networked with industry experts and other ChangeWarriors, and found solutions to real world problems, all in a few weeks!

Applications for Global Challenges and Social Justice are open now. Click to fill the form