The Otesha Project: sustainable consumer choices

By Richard Lakin

Last January, I was sent to Canada to videotape a segment on the Otesha Project for a humanitarian organization that was honoring young social entrepreneurs. Otesha's office is in a lovely old house in a residential neighborhood in Ottawa, which was snow-covered when we arrived. There are two things that you notice when you walk into their office...first, everyone is wearing hats and scarves because they keep the heat turned down...and second, there is a constant flurry of activity throughout the house. The Otesha Project operates in a very high-energy environment, and you immediately feel drawn into their movement.

I was there to interview Jessica Lax, the co-founder of the Otesha Project. Jessica had met Jocelyn Land-Murphy during a sustainability field studies program in Kenya in 2002, and their experiences left them overwhelmed with the inequality in resource allocation between North America and Africa, and to the global effects of their consumer society.

These two young women began to dream of the impact of spreading a message of sustainable consumer choices to Canada's youth. Thus, on Feb 16, 2002, on a beautiful sunny day in Kitale, Kenya, the Otesha Project was created.

Almost 2 years after the first Otesha dream sprouted under a tree in Kenya, it became a reality on October 10, 2003. On this date, the first 33 members of the Otesha Project completed their incredible 164-day bicycling & presenting venture across Canada, having made over 250 presentations to more than 12,000 young people across the country. Since that first project, the Otesha Project has only continued to grow. A dream born in Kenya has become a charitable organization of hopeful young people uniting as the Otesha Project. Otesha, which means "reason to dream" in Swahili, was created to mobilize youth to create local and global change through their daily consumer choices. The Otesha Project believes that there are alternatives to our culture of overconsumption, and that each one of us has opportunities to have positive impacts every single day.

The Otesha Project's education programs and bicycle tours use theatre, multi-media, and storytelling to engage a wide range of audiences, and have reached more than 85,000 people to date. Otesha’s performances focus on re-evaluating our daily choices to reflect the kind of future we'd like to see - rethinking what we really need, conserving resources, and voting with our dollars. Otesha's aim is to demonstrate the positive effects our everyday choices can have, by living sustainably, changing the world, and having loads of fun--all at the same time!

There is a segment about the Otesha Project on the 18 rabbits website: www.18rabbits.org

About Richard Lakin Richard Lakin is a co-founder of 18 rabbits digital media, a social entrepreneurial project that gives the world’s youth a voice, and is an advocate for student-produced new media. Richard has produced CSR media for multinational companies and NGOs all over the world.