Restoring Resilience – Connecting to Nature and Self Erasmus Project

Project Title

Restoring Resilience – Connecting to Nature and Self

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 adult education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2016

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Health and wellbeing; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

Restoring Resilience – Connecting to Nature and Self

Resilience is the ability of an individual, a community or a country to cope, adapt and quickly recover from stress and shocks caused by a disaster, violence or conflict. It reduces vulnerabilities and contributes to build local capacities so that people can cope better with shocks. This ability comes more than handy in our turbulent times. This is something very relevant for Europe now. This is not the time for business as usual.
That is why we wanted to connect with people (local residents) to tap into deeper levels of their humanity and to find meaning in their lives, in dealing with this sensitive topic, individually and collectively right now. Our strong conviction is that nature provides the fastest way to access our humanity, providing inspiration for sustainable and meaningful solutions that are taking into consideration the whole ecosystem.
The three partners are Rogers Foundation, Aura Association and Isoropia: a foundation, an association and a small enterprise, all working in the area of development and betterment of people and organizations.

The project had four objectives:
-build resilience to the crises that affect European Union now.
– experience nature as a guide.
– to create meaning, individually and collectively, opening yourself to the meaning of your life now, in the present moment, and to your human purpose, and collectively discover a shared meaning, getting inspiration from nature.
– to help raise the awareness of self (self-awareness) tapping into the deeper levels of our humanity.

Our target group were men and women already with an established existency but full with fear and questions (secondary target group), as well as all those people who work with them as trainers and counsellors (primary target group).

During the project we developed three Intellectual Outputs: a reference frame (based on which we published a scientific article), a MOOC curriculum and MOOC content about re-connecting to nature and self in order to increase resilience in times of crisis. The reference frame was developed with the involvement of about 60 adult educators and counsellors (including us). The MOOC curriculum was also discussed with a broad community through multiplier events.

The MOOC become available through the Udemy MOOC-portal, which we chose after thorough analysis. It is a free, open-access course, available at www.udemy.com, with the title “Connecting to Nature and Self”. It is available in English, Hungarian, Croatian and Italian.

The MOOC was blended with an in-nature, 1-week course for personal betterment, which proved to be very successful and inspiring for all of us with participants, including us. People fed back that it relevantly developed several of their skills which are considered to be part of resilience.

We also organized a set of disseminating activities, among them 2-2 multiplier events in all three countries, where we showed and discussed our intellectual outputs.

While we planned to reach about 600 people, with the reference frame we reached 51 outsider experts, only with the MOOC we reached 1336 registrants, we have had 88 participants at multiplier events, we had 17 people at the Training Course, and we have reached other several hundreds through the book publication and other dissemination activities.

We believe to have an impact on the very lives of our participants, which together add up and hopefully contributes to a more accepting and happy atmosphere in our countries.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 59983 Eur

Project Coordinator

Rogers Személyközpontú Oktatásért Alapítvány & Country: HU

Project Partners

• Isoropia d.o.o. za savjetovanje
• Aura Sviluppo Sostenibile – Centro studi, Formazione e Comunicazione