Young Reporters for the Environment

Our Young Reporters Litter Less Programme is aimed at students 11-25 years old. It aims to empower young people to take a stand on environmental issues that they feel strongly about and to give them a platform to articulate these issues through the media of writing, photography or video. So give your students a voice, and register your school to participate .

We’ve partnered with Mars Wrigley Foundation to offer New Zealand schools, universities, tertiary institutions and youth groups the opportunity to participate in our Young Reporters for the Environment Litter Less Programme (YRE). This well-established and internationally recognised environmental education programme is open to students aged 11-25 years and provides them with a chance to make their voices heard on environmental issues.

This year the focus is on litter, waste and/or environmental pollution.

Registrations

Registrations are open now and will close in Term 1 2024. The deadline for submissions to the YRE Litter Less competition is Thursday 25 July 2024.

Programme goals

The goal of the YRE Litter Less is to affect long-term behaviour change among young people. It aims to empower young people to take a stand on environmental issues they feel strongly about and to give them a platform to articulate these issues through the media of writing, photography or video. Students are also asked to link their projects to one of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Programme summary

YRE is designed for students aged 11 – 25 years.

Students are asked to pick an environmental topic relating to litter, waste and/or environmental pollution, investigate it, and then report on it using one of three categories: writing, photography or film.


You’ll also be encouraged to plan an environmental campaign or community action day where students will share their ideas and projects to raise awareness of an environmental issue within the wider school and community. We’ll provide you with an event toolkit to assist you with this task. You can also take part in some of our other programmes as your environmental campaign such as Clean Up Week, Backyard Battle and Upstream Battle.


Students are then invited to submit their assignments to the YRE Competition for a chance to win fantastic prizes, including one of four Stand Desks we have to give away, and perhaps even the opportunity to represent New Zealand.


The deadline for submissions to the competition is Thursday 25 July 2024.


We’ll put the best of the best national competition winners forward to represent New Zealand in YRE’s international competition.


We’ll also provide you with lots of resources to make life easy, and so you can ensure that the programme fits with your school and classroom curriculum, including: a classroom guide, handbooks, worksheets and lessons plans.

YRE Competition

View the winning entries from the 2023 YRE Litter Less Competition here.

#litterlesscampaign #litterlessplus #yrenz #YRE

Junior YRE

If your students are not yet old enough to participate in the YRE competition (under 11 years old), we’ve developed an exciting introduction to YRE resource for them to get a taster of the programme.

Our ‘How to write a news story’ resource will teach students about news reporting and help them create an article ready for publication.

Once your class has completed their articles, send them through to us by 18 October 2024 and we will publish the top three on our website.

Find out more about our Junior YRE resource