info.dreamline

With the Smurfs and the millennials and the UN and the media groups and the power of Dotsub behind our student dreamers, I can’t wait to get started….

Dream as a bird in the sky, soaring high freely in space.
Waiting for an achiever to be the beginning of peace.
By a high school student in Morocco

People lose thing in their hearts
People become crazy
Books make people understand
What is true, the good and the beautiful
By an elementary student in Shanghai, China

The Sustainable Development Goals, known as the SDGs, were adopted by the Heads of State and Governments at the United Nations in September of 2015.  They cover 17 key areas for positive global change, from an end to hunger to gender equity to clean air and water. Their target for realization is 2030, 12 years from now.

Last August from the 13th to the 21st, 1000 millennials gathered in Copenhagen to brainstorm and realize paths to achieving these goals. The event was created and supported by UNLEASH, a consortium of global commercial and nonprofit organizations.

From September 25th to the 27th, the UN held a Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Summit in New York City attended by 150 world leaders and convened as a high level plenary meeting of the General Assembly.

The week before, PVBLIC Foundation hosted its Media for Social Impact Summit in New York City, focusing on the UN SDGs and supported by Spotify, IMAX, HBO, Sony, Angry Birds, and dozens of other major media enterprises. Their One For All campaign, gathering corporate pledges to support one SDG, is sending this message:

On October 14th the animated children’s series Thomas & Friends, which is aired in 110 countries in 33 languages, announced it will be including 5 of the UN Sustainability Goals in the storylines of upcoming episodes. Earlier in the year, Sony announced integration of UN SDGs into it’s Smurf animation programming:

So what does this have to do with Dreamline? Plenty.

When we look at our students’ dreams, the theme of peace and justice is easy to find. So is good education, a healthy environment, meaningful rewarding work, and nearly every other area identified in the SDGs.

We can see from the beta testing on Dreamline that our students are already dreaming about these kinds of changes we need for the good of all–expressing them in words and art that are original and powerful.

To see what we’d find, we tagged all of the student dreams posted in Dreamline to date so they can be searched by any SDG. Just go to our Gallery, put in any SDG (for example #SDG4 for Quality Education) and you’ll see all of the flags that address that issue.

Here’s what we found:

TOP 5 from our sample of student flags from USA, Belize, China, Morocco, and Tanzania

 16.5%
Students dream of a safer world and an end to fighting and war. Students dream of a world that’s more fair.

 14.8%
Students dream of a healthy environment for plants and animals everywhere. Many students are especially concerned about treatment and habitat of animals.

 12.7%
Students dream about a cure for cancer, about healthy family members, and about access to compassionate care.

 11.6 %
Students dream of a more fair world and especially a more inclusive world.

 9.9%
Students dream of having a job that is meaningful and of their family members having jobs that can support them.

And here’s the big picture…

In the sample flags of our students we see and hear a clear and present voice for change,  beautifully expressed in art and poetry. We can see areas where educational programs can add to students’ current awareness of topics.

Our students’ dreams are a rich resource for inspiration and positive change. They come organically from the heart, across cultures and ages.

And in the larger world? In the world of 50 million teachers with their students globally? In every language?

Through our new partnership with Dotsub and the vision of its founder Michael Smolens, we’re forming a future where students can share dreams with each other and the wider public in any language. Dotsub enables stories told in any language to be available in any other language.

We’d like to see at least 10,000,000 student voices declaring and sharing their dreams on Dreamline well before 2030.

We’d like to tag them with SDG alignment, adding their collecive voices–unqustionably sincere and urgent–to the chorus calling for positive global change at a time when we need it most.

We want to offer our students connection to each other through those SDG alignments. We’d like to engage our students in age appropriate SDG-aligned colaborative projects (such as those already available through iEARN,)  transforming their shared dreams into  goals, and helping make those goals our shared reality. Before 2030.

Can we do this?

With the Smurfs and the millennials and the UN and the media groups and the power of Dotsub behind our student dreamers, I can’t wait to get started….

OK. I have a confession to make. I love the Container Store, and I recently realized it’s for the same reasons that I love Dreamline.

So I’m comparing my life’s work as an educator with a chain store in shopping malls?

Yes, actually. But here’s how I got there….

At this time of year people in my hemisphere are getting ready to go back to school, to get stuff that’s for organzing and getting set. So among other places, my wife and I found ourselves in The Container Store this past weekend. Rows upon rows of ways to store things in your closet, your desk, your kitchen, pretty much everywhere.

So how’s that connected to Dreamline?

Well at the Container Store, no one is telling you what clothing to wear, no one is telling you what to cook or eat, and no one is telling you what to write at your desk. You decide. But with good organization, you get efficiency, the chance to integrate with other parts of your life, and the capacity to change over time. All true for Deamline and Dream Flags.

But let’s go a little deeper. To the lunch container section. My favorite.

I did find an absolutely terrific new lunch container. Here’s what it looks like.

And, as you can see, it has great features.

1. It’s sturdy and closes securely, to protect my lunch from getting smooshed.
2. It’s the right size to hold what I want to eat.
3. It’s an easy shape to pack and carry to the lunchroom where I eat with others.
4. Also a good shape to wash so I can use it again next day.

You can see this demonstrated in the next 12 seconds by clicking below:

In short, it reflects my values, both for myself and my community. And it brings me out into the world as I eat lunch with others

This is what Dreamline does. No wonder I like it so much!

1. The flag is a safe place to pack my dreams.
2. I pack my flag with my deep desires and things that are good for me–my dreams to share with the world.
3. What I pack  fits on a certain size piece of cloth, connected to a line–that makes it easy to take out into the world and share with others–on Dreamline and in other places.
4. My dreams benefit my community and me; they change as I change, and I can make a new flag next year–through the same program.

That’s how the Dreamline works. How it grows and is growing.

So that’s my back-to-school reflection.

If you’ve been reading this blog, you already realize this has been an exceptional summer for Dreamline. More great blogs on that coming soon from friends in Morocco and elsewhere.

But if you’ve been reading headlines, you also realize that there is an urgency for helping our students in the direction of their dreams like nothing before.

A great start in that direction is to tap into Character Day on Sept. 13 in whatever way you can.

We already have a “container,” a Dreamline, to carry and connect the heart melodies of our students, this year and every year. But the box is meaningless without its content. Because of Dreamline teachers who invite and support students as they declare and share their dreams, and because of who our students really are, that content is transformative again and again. And we all need it now.