Raw Beauty: student-made sustainable soaps

Ruby Psillides, Grade 11 student, UWCSEA East
1 April 2022

Raw Beauty, a new Environmental Initiative (EI) currently based on the UWCSEA East campus, hopes to spread awareness about managing and reusing packaging sustainably through soap making. Raw Beauty's primary goal is to teach students "how to make soaps and other toiletries sustainably, with zero plastic [packagings]." However, the EI has begun to seep into the curriculum, allowing students to understand the interconnectedness of service learning. Chemistry, for example, has integrated a soap making example in its distillation unit for its IB programme. Enterprise, too, has begun to explore Raw Beauty as a prime example of a self-sustaining business and using a circular economy. The Chair of Raw Beauty, Sophia Casalme, revealed the new partnership between the departments through a recent soap-making event involving Grade 9 Enterprise students. She hopes that further collaboration between the heads of department will enable the identification of EI's interconnectedness to topics discussed in class and, therefore, holistically contribute to the UWC mission and vision.

Established by Daraja GC, Raw Beauty has expanded itself, distributing and promoting its handmade products across the UWC community. In the past year, Raw Beauty has made an impactful change in the UWC community. Some of the critical highlights of Raw Beauty's journey include their new partnership with the Daraja GC, their budding relationship with the Parents' Association, and their ever-growing influence on the Urban Gardening EI. A combination of the upcycling of their packaging, the distillation of their soaps using equipment on campus and the on-site growing of plants to use as essences for their soaps similarly align with that of a systems-focused approach for EI circularity – their group aligns itself to the UWC mission.

Students feel that the enormity of our school makes it hard for them to see direct action occur to issues that students are passionate about. A student in Raw Beauty had commented: "In previous years, I have only been in [Global Concern groups], where it is harder to see the impact of our actions on the local community. By joining Raw Beauty this year, I hoped to communicate and engage with various other services." It is incredible to see how Raw Beauty enables students to be actively involved in the sustainable process and thus inspires students to be their agents for change. If this is happening in one of our EIs, one can assume that the same purposeful action is reflected in most others.

Despite Raw Beauty being a new EI, it drastically changes how we view EIs on our campus through their further integration into the school curriculum. Students observe how the school mission is reflected in aspects of the school, in and out of the classroom.