November 16th marked the end of the National Mobility Challenge #Walk15 which was initiated by the President of Republic of Lithuania Gitanas Nausėda. Such an initiative has been held for the third time this year: the goal of which is to gather the communities together, encourage them to be more active and overall more environmentally-friendly.
#Walk15 was categorized into the following groups: “Cities”, “Towns”, “Communities”, “Lithuanian Foreigners Abroad”, “Organisations”, “Schools”, “Universities”. This year’s initiative attracted a record number of participants, with more than 160,000 people taking part in the project and forming 3,500 teams. As much as 40 billion steps were taken during the entire period of the challenge: in other words, people walked 780 times around the globe!
59 Lithuanian higher and professional educational institutions participated in the "University Challenge” category. The category, which attracted almost 12,000 participants, also exceeded the set goal of walking a total of 500,000,000 steps. Representatives of higher education institutions together made almost 3 billion steps, which means that people made their way around the planet 60 times. In terms of the environmental impact, campaign participants saved 382,719 kg of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) and symbolically planted 10,639,579 virtual trees.
The community of Kaunas University of Applied Engineering Sciences was extremely active: 465 walking enthusiasts joined the challenge and almost doubled the total number of steps taken compared to last year (130 million steps were taken in 2022). The members of the university traveled around the globe 3 times and prevented 16,800 kg (CO2) of gas from being released into the environment as well as planted 467,038 virtual trees.
As many as 107 university members achieved the individual challenge goal of walking 400,000 steps. The community achieved the sixth place in the overall ranking and got the first place among the state colleges of Lithuania!
Congratulations to the members of the KTK community who have made the biggest amount of steps:
- 1st place - Mantonis (3,164,789 steps)
- 2nd place - Danke (1,601,772 steps)
- 3rd place - Vaidas Mickevičius (1,591,018 steps)
We thank everyone who contributed to this initiative, and we hope that we will achieve even better results together in the future.
