Green Future Fund accompanies Eco-Schools

Ahead of the ASEAN Eco-Schools Viet Nam 2025 Award Ceremony, Le Thai Ha, Director of the Green Future Fund (Vingroup), shared insights on the significance of the Fund’s partnership and its long-term expectations for environmental education.

What motivated the Green Future Fund to accompany the ASEAN Eco-Schools Viet Nam 2025 Award, particularly as the theme “Plastic-Free Schools” has become an urgent global priority?

The Green Future Fund chose to accompany the ASEAN Eco-Schools Viet Nam 2025 Award because we firmly believe that the most sustainable solutions to global environmental challenges must start with education, specifically, with schools.

Plastic waste today is no longer solely an environmental or ocean issue. It has become a challenge closely linked to human health, quality of life, and the future of younger generations. In this context, building “plastic-free schools” carries special significance. These are places where students do not only learn about the environment but live with green values every day, forming awareness, habits, and green behaviors from an early age.

The ASEAN Eco-Schools Viet Nam Award is not merely a competition; it is an environmental education model aligned with national and ASEAN-level commitments, creating opportunities for Vietnamese schools to assert a pioneering role in the green transition.

For the Green Future Fund, this is a practical way to translate major sustainability commitments into concrete actions, starting in classrooms and spreading outward to the community.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Environment assigned Vietnam Agriculture and Nature News to coordinate with the International Cooperation Department (ICD) and the Green Future Fund to organize the ASEAN Eco-Schools Viet Nam 2025 Award – Plastic-Free Schools. Information is available at nongnghiepmoitruong.vn, ecoschool.vn, or via journalist Nguyen Quynh Chi (tel. 0967 181 555; email: nquynhchi.00@gmail.com).

As an accompanying partner, what message does the Fund wish to send to students, schools, and society in the journey to reduce plastic waste?

The Green Future Fund would like to convey a simple but powerful message: every green action today helps shape tomorrow’s future.

For students, we hope they understand that environmental protection does not have to be distant or overwhelming. It can start with saying no to single-use plastics, sorting waste, and reusing familiar items, small actions that, when repeated daily, create meaningful change.

For schools and teachers, we hope environmental education will go beyond short-term campaigns and become an integral part of school culture, where students are inspired to proactively create their own green solutions.

For the community, especially parents, we hope green values nurtured in schools will extend into households, making environmental protection a shared way of life across society.

Through your involvement, what changes have you observed in awareness and action among schools, teachers, and students regarding plastic waste?

What truly moved us during this journey is how many schools have translated awareness into concrete, sustained action.

Many schools have proactively developed comprehensive eco-school models, from source-based waste sorting and reducing single-use plastics to integrating recycling and circular economy concepts into teaching and experiential learning. Importantly, many initiatives originate from students themselves, showing they are not just participants but active agents of change.

The award’s attraction of more than 300 submissions, along with study visits and learning exchanges at Viet My Can Tho School, the First Prize winner of the 2024 award has helped schools see that green transition pathways are entirely feasible with commitment and the right partnerships.

Notably, many students have brought green habits from school back to their families, becoming “seeds of change” for sustainable lifestyles in the community.

In your view, what role should businesses and social funds play to ensure environmental education goes beyond short-term movements?

To prevent environmental education from becoming a short-lived trend, long-term engagement from businesses and social funds is essential.

First, they help ensure stable resources, enabling green initiatives to continue without interruption after competitions or media campaigns end. Within the award framework, allocating part of the funding to support disadvantaged schools is one way to ensure equal opportunities for green transition, regardless of local conditions.

Second, businesses and funds can act as connectors, amplifiers, and multipliers, turning effective models into references that inspire broader adoption by schools and localities.

More importantly, such partnerships help build a sustainable ecosystem for environmental education, where schools, families, businesses, and society work together for a green future.

After the ASEAN Eco-Schools Viet Nam 2025 Award, what directions does the Fund envision to further nurture a broader eco-school network?

Following the 2025 award, the Green Future Fund has discussed with the Ministry of Agriculture and Environment the prospect of jointly building and leading a National Eco-Schools Network, a step toward nurturing green values in a systematic and long-term manner.

Through this network, schools would not only be connected but also supported year-round in implementing green initiatives, financially, technically, and through communications. The Fund aims to work with partners to develop exemplary eco-school models that can be scaled up and adapted to diverse local conditions.

Looking further ahead, we hope this network will help cultivate a generation of young citizens who live green and consume responsibly, so that from today’s classrooms, the values of sustainable development spread strongly throughout society in the future.

The ASEAN Eco-Schools Viet Nam 2025 Award Ceremony is scheduled for 8:00 a.m. on January 31, 2026, at Hanoi Children’s Palace (Facility 2), Pham Hung Street, Cau Giay District, Hanoi, chaired by leaders of the Ministry of Agriculture and Environment. The ceremony will be livestreamed on Agriculture and Environment Television and Vietnam Agriculture and Nature News (nongnghiepmoitruong.vn), and simultaneously broadcast online via Zoom (Meeting ID: 973 8347 6746; Passcode: SA3101).

Thanks for the interview!