From Individuals to a Community: Project Week 2026

CAS & Community Engagement | Grade 11 | June 7–13, 2026

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Ten months ago, a new Grade 11 cohort arrived at UWC Thailand: from Palestine and Poland, from Myanmar and Macedonia, from Canada and China and everywhere in between. They were strangers navigating a new school, a new country, and a new way of living together.

This June, that same group scattered across Thailand for Project Week and came back as something different. Not just classmates. A community.

From June 7–13, 2026, our Grade 11 students travelled to seven partner sites, leading their own projects, solving their own problems, and discovering what they are truly capable of when no one is handing them the answers.

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Seven Sites. Seven Journeys. One Cohort.

This year's groups travelled to:

• Koh Panyee (Phang Nga Bay): English education at a floating village school
• Mercy Centre (Bangkok): Community service with families in Khlong Toey
• Chance Foundation / Mirror (Chiang Rai): Animal welfare, veterinary outreach, and education
• Earth Home (Chiang Mai): Sustainable building, permaculture, and community living
• Our Jungle Camp (Khao Sok): Rainforest ecology, conservation, and environmental action
• Baan Unrak (Sangkhlaburi): Relief distribution, farm work, and child education
• Outdoor Leaders Program (Phuket): ACA kayaking certification and instructor training

Each group arrived with a plan and quickly discovered that plans are only the beginning.

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Stories from the Field

Koh Panyee: Teaching on the Water

Nine students travelled by bus and boat to the floating village of Koh Panyee to teach English to primary and secondary students at the local school. What started as lesson plans became something richer: a week of games, fishing trips, football matches, and a Wai Kru ceremony none of them will forget.

With Thai speakers Phu and Deedar bridging language gaps, the team taught greetings, phonics, numbers, and careers to over 50 students daily, with ripple effects reaching more than 100 children across the school. By Friday, the school was closed but the children came looking for them anyway.

"Seeing kids running toward us giving us hugs, asking whether we will come back next year. That showed us we had successfully formed strong bonds over just a week."

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Mercy Centre, Bangkok: Service as Relationship

The Bangkok group arrived at the Mercy Centre in Khlong Toey expecting long hours in a tough environment. What they found was far more nuanced: a community of children who were resilient, joyful, and deeply human.

Over the week, the group ran activities for children, joined cooking and gardening workshops, and ambitiously began drafting a proposal for a CAS Service Ambassador programme to create a lasting partnership between UWC Thailand and the Mercy Centre. Navigating language barriers, an unexpected hotel mix-up, and a TOK deadline mid-week, they discovered that real service requires flexibility above all else.

"Things aren't always what they seem. The joy, resilience and optimism of the children reminded us that hope can still exist in the face of hardship."

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Chance Foundation, Chiang Rai: Caring for Every Living Thing

Nine students worked across three rotating roles: maintaining the animal shelter, providing mobile grooming and vaccination services in the local community, and teaching English in primary schools, with animal welfare education woven in.

What they didn't expect was the nuance. Dogs visibly neglected, not from cruelty, but from financial hardship and lack of knowledge. Owners who cared deeply but couldn't afford proper care. The students left Chiang Rai with a more sophisticated understanding of welfare, systemic causes of suffering, and the difference between addressing symptoms and building lasting change.

"Lasting change also relies on community awareness and responsible pet ownership. Chance Foundation's work is more of an end-of-the-course solution, and that shifted how we see service."

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Earth Home, Chiang Mai: Building Something That Lasts
Ten students arrived at Earth Home not knowing each other well. Some had barely exchanged more than a few sentences before the trip. What followed was a week of making adobe bricks in the mud, planting bamboo, replastering walls, visiting a man who had built his entire home from sustainable materials over 12 years, and ending with a bonfire in the rain, singing UWC songs, painting their names and flags on Earth Home's walls alongside every group that had come before them.

"I thought it was gonna be a week of hard work that is barely memorable. I was wrong."

The physical work was demanding. The community they found was unexpected. And the evening around the fire, singing as the rain fell, became the kind of moment that defines a year.

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Our Jungle Camp, Khao Sok: Ancient Forest, New Perspectives
The Khao Sok group immersed themselves in one of the world's oldest rainforests (estimated at over 160 million years old) and spent the week exploring it with purpose. They painted murals using natural plant-based pigments, planted rice, kayaked through waterways collecting litter, designed conservation signs for tourist hiking trails, and conducted day and night hikes to discover the rainforest's extraordinary biodiversity.

Scorpions glowing under UV light. The distinction between venomous and poisonous, explained in the field. A morning at a local school sharing cultures through dance, song, and English games. This group returned with a recalibrated sense of what it means to live lightly on the earth.

"Conservation is not only about cleaning up existing problems. It's about educating people to prevent future damage."

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Baan Unrak, Sangkhlaburi: Leading with Humanity
The Baan Unrak group navigated more logistical challenges than most: an early departure announced a day ahead, a miscommunication about arrival dates, muddy terrain during relief distribution, heat, insects, and accommodation that tested comfort levels. And yet, theirs may be the most honest reflection of the week.

They packed 35 relief packages assembly-line-style. They sorted hundreds of library books. They dug in a greenhouse in 35-degree heat. They felt uncomfortable being photographed while distributing aid and they said so, thinking carefully about what ethical documentation actually means. They met university students who had grown up in Baan Unrak and were now returning to give back.

By the final day, the hardest part wasn't the work. It was leaving.

"Leading with humanity means helping without assuming, taking photos without exploiting, and treating everyone with dignity."

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Outdoor Leaders Program, Phuket: Learning to Teach
Eight students completed Kru Rob's intensive five-day ACA kayaking instructor course at the Playyard. They paddled five to six hours a day, gave morning presentations on navigation and safety, managed equipment, and practised rescues in all weather, including thunderstorms that moved training onto land.

Every member of the group passed. They are now qualified to teach kayaking to future UWC Thailand students and in doing so, become part of the infrastructure of outdoor education at this school for years to come.

"The instructional skills we gained go beyond just kayaking. Most of us will be future leaders in many other aspects. We now know how to allow others to gain the skills we have."

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What Project Week Is Really About

Every group came back with something different: sea salt, mud, memories of children's faces, new calluses on their hands. But what they carried home in common was harder to put into words.

Project Week is not a holiday. It is not charity tourism. It is a deliberate, structured encounter with the world beyond UWC Thailand's campus, one where students must lead, organise, adapt, disagree, recover, and ultimately rely on each other in ways that a normal school week never demands.

This year's cohort did all of that. They also did something else: they showed up with the openness that makes these partnerships worth sustaining. Our community organisations (Mercy Centre, Baan Unrak, Chance Foundation, Earth Home, Our Jungle Camp, Koh Panyee school) invest significant time and trust in each group of UWC students that arrives. What was reflected back to us this year, in every article and every debrief, was that trust being honoured.
 

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To our Grade 11 students: ten months ago you were new to each other. You are not new to each other anymore. You have slept in unfamiliar places, done hard physical work in heat and rain, communicated across language barriers, navigated logistics that didn't go to plan, and held each other through moments of doubt and exhaustion. You have also danced around bonfires, chased scorpions with UV torches, been given flowers by children, and been asked by those same children whether you are coming back next year.

What you built this year, with each other and with the communities that welcomed you, is exactly what this programme exists to create.

We are proud of every single one of you.

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UWC Thailand | CAS & Community Engagement | Project Week 2026