Mind your Mind: Synergies between Mindfulness and Nature-Based Methods Erasmus Project

Project Title

Mind your Mind: Synergies between Mindfulness and Nature-Based Methods

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: Inclusion – equity; Environment and climate change; Health and wellbeing

Project Summary

Mind your Mind is a Strategic Partnership project, born from the need to address wellbeing issues affecting european youngsters, namely the excessive use of technological devices and the lack of contact with the natural environment.

On one hand, the urge for a quick access to content and the continuous stimulation generates phenomena knew as “continuous partial attention”, which interferes with focus, concentration and decision making. The development of a dependent use of technology has important consequences: being linked to the undermining of human relations, creativity and academic performance. On the other hand, numerous studies have shown the importance of interacting with nature, especially for the improvement of young people health and wellbeing. In Europe, the contact with nature is decreasing more and more, due to several factors, even determining a so called “nature deficit disorder”. Nature has been demonstrated to increase capacity for concentration, self-control, stress reduction and emotions management. Moreover, even though the role of mindfulness and nature-based methods has been fully recognized, a combination of the two methods is lacking at the European level.

The project “Mind your Mind” aimed to contribute to solve these issues in an innovative way, developing new tools able to combine in a synergic way mindfulness techniques and nature-based methods. The main aim is, thus, “to contribute to the youth work community with innovative and inclusive non-formal education tools of high quality based on the synergetic combination of mindfulness and nature-based methodologies”. The project objectives were: to encourage reflection on the implications of technology abuse in everyday life among partner organizations; to improve the qualification and skills of participating youth workers linked to their professional profiles; to foster the development of self-awareness, conscious living, and empowerment the participating local youngsters; to encourage the application of the potential inclusion of the proposed techniques among young people with concentration difficulties, lower academic performance or special vulnerability; to encourage the awareness that the needs addressed are common to the European Youth; to improve the partners’ quality of youth work; to strengthen a European network of organisations and trainers working with similar approaches; to contribute to the participating local youngsters’ appreciation of nature.

The methods used involved mindfulness techniques, focused on learning how to more effectively manage attention, and nature-based methods, a kind of outdoor activities where nature has a central role.
The project involved three main partners from Spain, Italy and Greece. The first meeting was in Greece and HYP provided knowledge on KA2 Strategic Partnerships. The second one will be held in Spain, where Viaje a Sostenibilidad organised a training course share best practices of related to mindfulness and nature.

The last meeting will be in Italy, thus closing the circle, taking care of the dissemination and of the multiplier events. The three partner organisations have been working together in the last three years, they all took part in the writing of the project and they believe that this strategic partnership will further enhance both their own organization and their structured relationship.

As result of this project a book, 8 videos and a website have been developed. They are accessible at mindandnature.site

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 42285 Eur

Project Coordinator

Viaje a la Sostenibilidad & Country: ES

Project Partners

• VulcanicaMente
• KINONIKI SINETAIRISTIKI EPICHERISIELLINIKI SYMMETOCHI NEON