?You don?t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.?

This is one of the quotes that still inspire me everyday making me remember not to doubt your abilities and go for the dream you aspire for. This was the same thought when I founded Students For The Earth on March 19th 2013, which started off as a simple Facebook page for Environmental awareness to one of the leading youth organizations internationally. 

In view of our 5th year celebrations in 2018, we planned to kick start it off with an International Short Story Competition which we launched in July 2017. We would like to thank Youth Opportunities for their support in promoting the event.  We received nearly 300 entries around the globe by the last date of 21st September 2017 (International Peace Day).  

We had two teams of segregators who assigned roll numbers to each entry for complete anonymity and fair judging and then a team of judges who checked through the entries and marked them on a scale of 40 with criteria including Originality, Language, Use of Theme, How Inspiring the Story is and Creativity. 

After compiling the marks, the top 5 in each category, School/Under 18 and College/Above 18, were selected as winners of the Judged Category and also the top 20 in each category were selected to be eligible for the Popular Category decided by Votes on Facebook. 

The competition was highly successful reaching out to more than 40,000 people through Facebook, etc during the Voting period. 

Now, How did this competition prove to important for this time?
Our theme was, "Small Acts, Big Impact". It simply means whatever small things you might think you are doing to help the society, it can amplify and become big impacts later or if repeated by many others who are inspired by your actions. 

In our times, many of us are skeptical in doing something good because of many reasons. One could be the lack of opportunities available, maybe time, budget, etc. But, we wanted to spread the message that even small acts are important.

We were amazed to see the amount of stories that came which showed how small acts created big impacts. From a waste collection drive to even how a person made a garden in a home with disabled children, etc, there were many beautiful stories.

It was tough for us to select the final winners. You can find the ebook Links on mysfe.weebly.com/sissc.html .

We announced the results via a Live Telecast on the Facebook Page.

We would like to thank all the people who have involved in the judging process and those who supported us throughout. We would also like to thank all the participants, their parents, teachers and well wishers for their support throughout.

We look forward to organizing the Sfe. International Short Story Competition again in 2018. 
Till then, do visit, www.mysfe.weebly.com and  www.facebook.com/studentsfortheearth for latest events. 

As an Ecogeneration Ambassador, I believe this organizing this competition has helped us to inspire more students to do good to their environment and community.

All The Best!