Join the No Elevators Day for yourself and the environment - including your workplace!
17/04/2024Eszter Anna Szaniszlo and Maria Malyshkina, ISCA
No Elevators Day is just around the corner! It's a chance to challenge ourselves and our friends, colleagues and family, have some fun, and even make a positive change to our health and the planet. Join us on 24 April 2024 for the official celebration all over the world and online - and spread the word to include more people!
Four reasons to use the stairs
Here's why you should #UseTheStairs:
Health Benefits: Climbing stairs boosts your cardiovascular health, strengthens muscles, and burns calories. It's a simple yet effective way to incorporate physical activity into your day.
Stress Reduction: Feeling stressed? Take the stairs! Physical activity releases endorphins, leaving you feeling energised and refreshed. Say goodbye to stress and hello to a healthier, happier you!
Environmental Impact: By choosing stairs over elevators, you're reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions. Every step counts towards a greener planet!
Personal Challenges: Turn stair climbing into a personal challenge! Set goals, track your progress, and celebrate your achievements. Challenge your friends, family, or colleagues to join you and see who can climb the most flights of stairs!
If you're eager to make a significant offline impact within your community, consider organising a flagship event in your building, office, or city. Invite local press and celebrities to join in! Explore our available resources at https://no-elevators-day.nowwemove.com/ to help you get started, and read further for tips on activating your workplace.
Focus on the workplace
If you are interested in introducing more physical activity at your workplace, but don't know how to introduce this sensitive topic to your manager and colleagues, we have a solution! A toolkit that can help is called ‘Physical activity and mental wellbeing: A brain break toolkit for workplaces’ and it is our peer-to-peer guide for those who want to take the lead. It is your conversation-starter and idea-generator of simple actions that can boost staff energy, mood and productivity. Armed with this powerful resource, you will contribute to creating workplaces that nurture rather than deplete people’s mental health.
On the toolkit's pages we present the problem, explain why it’s everyone’s problem and why it’s ok for us to talk about it – and how. We present the evidence that our brains and bodies need active breaks from sedentary work and case examples from successful organisations and workplace activation events like No Elevators Day.
Last year results and highlights
Still not convinced? Let's take a throwback to the last Wednesday of April 2023 to find out how people and organisations around the globe supported the initiative.
The National Coordinators organised 340 events in 25 countries, which involved almost 63000 participants – and that’s not counting all the action on social media! No Elevators Day attracted the most participants in Spain: 50000 participants! In Bulgaria 6000 people attending 60 events, followed by Latvia with around 2000 people joining the celebration. Association Healthy Life - Kinesis (Udruga Zdrav život – Kinezis) organised a No Elevators Day event in Bosnia and Herzegovina for the first time, which turned out to be a big success. The festival of running up the most famous stairs in Mostar attracted 1150 participants and gained lots of attention on social media platforms and local news websites.
Thanks to the news articles published by local websites in Spain, Bulgaria and other countries, the #UseTheStairs message reached millions of people. Social media channels saw lots of stairs action, too! For example, posts and stories from the hospitals and universities in Switzerland reached not only their social media followers, but also thousands of their patients who could join the No Elevators Day at their facilities. Deutscher Turner-Bund, a member of International Sport and Culture Association who turned 175 last year and has more than 25 thousand followers on Instagram, shared a post about the No Elevators Day as well, helping reach more people in Germany.
ISCA's inspiring video from the No Elevators Day 2023 celebration
On 26 April 2023, the ISCA team climbed one of the most impressive staircases in Copenhagen: Our Saviour's Church (Vor Frelsers Kirke). Why? To film a new video to celebrate and promote No Elevators Day, using a drone to capture the most impressive shots of our orange stair-climbing "line dance" to the top.
You can watch the video below and here, with additional footage and editing by ISCA's Visual Specialist Kristine Onarheim. Check out more No Elevators Day 2023 action, including a behind-the-scenes reel by ISCA Youth Officer Julia Lisewska at NowWeMOVE Instagram and TECH DRONE MEDIA on YouTube.
Read more: Why I shot drone footage for No Elevators Day for FREE!
Stay tuned to this website and our social media channels for more stories from the day! Follow us on Instagram and Facebook and check out other #NowWeMove initiatives https://www.isca.org/nowwemove.
