Students embrace tech to boost social impact projects during pandemic

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May 26, 2021, 03:00 ET

LONDON, May 26, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Nord Anglia Education, the world's largest premium international schools group, today released figures showing how its digital strategy has galvanized students' community volunteering efforts during the pandemic.

From September 2020 to March 2021, Nord Anglia's students successfully pivoted online to continue engaging in community-driven action focused on tackling the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. Using Share A Dream, Nord Anglia's online social engagement platform, thousands of students volunteered nearly 56,000 hours for community outreach programmes, raised US$433,000 dollars for local charities, and collected 50,000 goods for donating to community projects.

Nord Anglia's Share A Dream platform has grown in popularity and this year has seen a 68% increase in student users, compared to September 2019 – March 2020. The online platform facilitates community engagement, by enabling students around the world to plan, run, and crucially, track all outreach activities and evaluate the impact of their work in local communities. Designed with a social network look and feel, students use the platform to collaborate with each other to share and refine ideas, and recruit each other for causes they are passionate about.

Despite the many challenges posed by various lockdown restrictions, highlights included:

Students in Europe fundraising US$165,000 for 52 local charities
Students in India volunteering 2,000 hours, including collecting food packages to provide support to families in rural Hyderabad
Students in China volunteering 3,688 hours and raising money to fund life-saving heart surgery for a 17-month-old child
Students in Vietnam raising US$68,000 for 27 local charities
Students in North America and Latin America raising US$107,000 for charities, including students in Ecuador who donated computers so local school children could continue to learn virtually.

Dr Elise Ecoff, Group Director of Education, for Nord Anglia Education, said: "Given all the tremendous challenges created by the pandemic, it makes our students' efforts to help their communities even more impressive. We're incredibly proud of their resilience and teamwork to make a difference, no matter what. With our Share A Dream platform, we've created a way for our students to connect, share ideas, and deliver volunteering activities to tackle the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. It's another great example of how our digital strategy helps our students to learn and develop inside and outside of the classroom."

About Nord Anglia Education

Nord Anglia Education (NAE) is the world's leading premium schools organisation, with 73 schools across 30 countries. Our schools go beyond traditional learning to deliver a high quality, transformational education to 67,000 students from kindergarten through to the end of secondary school. We offer multiple internationally recognised curriculums, including the English Curriculum, the International Baccalaureate, the Swiss Maturité and the US Curriculum, amongst others.

Our global scale enables us to recruit and retain world-leading teachers and to offer our students unforgettable experiences through our partnerships with world-renowned institutions The Juilliard School, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and UNICEF. As part of the NAE family, every student can connect and collaborate on our bespoke Global Campus platform to bring their learning to life beyond the classroom.

Founded in 1972 in the United Kingdom, initially offering learning services such as English-as-a-foreign-language classes, NAE opened its first international school in 1992: the British School Warsaw. In the 2000s, NAE began a strategic focus on premium international schools, with rapid growth in Asia, the Americas, China and across Europe and the Middle East. In July 2019, the company relocated its headquarters from Hong Kong to London.

For more information, please visit www.nordangliaeducation.com.

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SOURCE Nord Anglia Education