Get Active! Make Eco-lifestyles the new Reality Erasmus Project

Project Title

Get Active! Make Eco-lifestyles the new Reality

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for youth

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Entrepreneurial learning – entrepreneurship education; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Environment and climate change

Project Summary

Young people are facing the dilemma of maturing into adulthood facing social exclusion, difficulties securing meaningful work, and few opportunities to engage practically with sustainability issues. In many countries, youth unemployment rates are high, putting millions at risk of social exclusion, depression and lack of opportunities. The pandemic has only worsened the situation. These issues are compounded by the many socioeconomic and ecological crises we are collectively facing, and the realisation that to reach the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement, initiatives are desperately needed to encourage young people to engage and take leadership.

ECO GAMER seeks to empower young people from diverse backgrounds to assess their local contexts, and design, implement and celebrate regenerative solutions together whilst augmenting their skills to enter a competitive job market. In-line with the Europe 2020 Strategy that spotlights youth entrepreneurship as a key objective, we recognise that social inclusion can emerge from actively collaborating in beneficial community projects. Similarly, an EU Council report entitled ‘Conclusions on Promoting Youth Entrepreneurship to Foster Social Inclusion of Young People’ recognises that social entrepreneurship “present[s] great opportunities for transforming young people’s creativity and human capital into smart growth and jobs’ and “is a powerful tool to promote social inclusion and social engagement especially among the youth”. To this end, and with creativity, interactivity and active engagement at its heart, ECO GAMER uses an innovatively playful approach to activate and connect youth to start social enterprise and build community ‘where they stand’ whilst contributing towards sense of purpose and self-esteem.

Using innovative pedagogies based on Game Based Learning, Educational Live Action Roleplaying Games, Education for Sustainable Development, and Nature Based Solutions to climate change, we created a set of open source resources for young people, youth workers, students and researchers as well as for any place-based communities or projects wishing to better understand their own impact and potential. These include:

1) A holistic and scientifically sound Impact Assessment for individuals and place-based communities, projects, groups or families. The Impact Assessment is available in different online and offline formats for both individuals and groups to map and assess their lifestyles through the lens of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as well as through a set of Ecovillage Design Principles: a framework used to depict community regeneration through participatory design in four dimensions of sustainability: social, cultural, ecological and economy. The Assessment is accessible online, with live results presented visually. It can also be done through an interactive downloadable spreadsheed using radar charts to give easily comparable results, or as a live session with a group, using a deck of cards developed by the project.

2) An innovative and experiential social entrepreneurship, collaborative leadership and sustainable community building training in the form of a live action game called the Game of Regeneration, playable in teams or with individual players in multiple formats, including a live action role playing game and a tabletop version. In both versions, players solve missions and implement projects and solutions in their communities in real-time. The game contains a 95 page facilitators manual detailing all steps, excercises, sessions, necessary materials and elements of the game, a game myth. It also contains 4 decks of cards: 9 stepping stones to track the journey of the game; ecovillage design cards to map the journey through cultural, economic, ecological and social regeneration; challenge and quality cards that add randomness to the game. It also contains a tile-based gameboard for the tabletop version.

Engaging primarily young people, many of them unemployed and from rural areas, students, youth-workers, teachers, researchers and local sustainable community members and project, we also achieved the following:

– 8 youth-led and designed projects for local regeneration prototyped, with 3 receiving support through a social business incubator.
– 200 good practices for local and community-scale action for social, cultural, economic and ecological regeneration researched and curated
– 16 Regenerative Development Goals with 170 subgoals for community-led action formulated
– 201 people engaged in multiplier events
– 121 people, most below 25 and many from rural or economically depressed areas, played the Game, with hundreds more playing teasers during dissemination events
– 20 youth and 15 youthworkers trained as Game and Assessment Facilitators
– 880 people completed an Impact Assessment
– strong friendships between partner organisation as well as multiple new alliances and projects created

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 205144,2 Eur

Project Coordinator

GLOBAL ECOVILLAGE NETWORK & Country: UK

Project Partners

• Global Ecovillage Network of Europe
• Damanhur Education APS
• SEKEM DEVELOPMENT FOUNDATION – SDF
• FCIENCIAS.ID – ASSOCIACAO PARA A INVESTIGACAO E DESENVOLVIMENTO DE CIENCIAS
• GLOBAL ECOVILLAGE NETWORK OF EUROPEEV