Tomorrow – The World is Full of Solutions Erasmus Project

Project Title

Tomorrow – The World is Full of Solutions

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 : School Exchange Partnerships

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Environment and climate change; Civic engagement / responsible citizenship; Agriculture, forestry and fisheries

Project Summary

The worldwide climate and ecological problems are lying heavily on our students shoulders. They are interested in these problems, they fear them, but most of the time they feel helpless and powerless against them.

We got inspired by a 2015 french documentary called “Tomorrow” that won several awards (https://www.demain-lefilm.com/en). It is part of a huge range of high quality European documentaries of the last fifteen years specializing in global problems. But most of these films depict a very gloomy and negative picture of today’s world and do not offer any solutions. Tomorrow is radically different as it focuses not on the problems, but on solutions. And not on solutions debated in international meetings by politicians but on small local solutions thought of by normal people. These solutions are among others Urban Gardening, Aquaponic, alternative local currencies, bike friendly cities, local energy production and other initiatives used in so called transition towns (https://transitionnetwork.org/).

This idea stroke us to be perfect for our young European citizens. They are all very interested in these problems and are longing to be able to do something about it. With the help of the European funding, our students investigated the ecological problems in their area, participated in already existing local projects of sustainability and dveoped new ones. They also investigated how these problems are tackled in different European countries.

Our main focus in this project was on the students. The students worked throughout the whole 24 month on the project in at least biweekly meetings with the teachers, at home, together with students of other participating countries via E-mail and social media. The students were aged 12-15. Most of the work was done by this group of students but there were also school wide activities on certain topics. On these occasion as the earth hour or the local carrot mobs we reached out to our whole school communities.
There were about 250 students and about 50 teachers taking part in international exchanges and the whole school communities were involved during the international meetings and special events.

The 24 months of the project were divided into several stages and four international meetings. Sadly the last meeting and the last phase didn’t happen due to the sudden stop of the project caused by the Covid pandemic and reducing the effective project time to 18 months.
In the first stage at the beginning the students examined their community, checking for ecological problems special to their environment, searching for already existing local sustainability projects and decided on which topics to work on.
In the next stage every group has chosen their local projects, bike friendly quarters, zero waste projects, swap markets to evade things being thrown away, working in carrot mobs with local businesses to make them act more environment friendly, organizing bike competitions between classes and between schools, installing bike repair stations in front of the school, participating in the Fridays for future events, reforestation projects in the local area, urban gardening in school, building solar panels to warm some of the school water, working with local producers and school cafeterias to make school meals with local produce and many more. Already during their work students were asked to look at the bigger picture, they continued to work on their local project but they were as well widening their horizon. The students looked further than their local community and researched and visited other similar projects in the area like eco friendly pellet production, nature reserve projects or local ecological food production. They will contacted their local administrations to get information about how the administration is already working on local sustainability projects. If possible, they tried to involve local politicians and administrations into their projects.

This project taught our students to get aware of their environment, of worldwide ecological problems and on the different possibilities of every single European Citizen how they can change society, politics and economy in small ways by their own choices and by participating in small ambitious local projects. The Tomorrow project taught our students valuable lessons to raise them to adults that can participate in civic and social life.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 106293 Eur

Project Coordinator

Gymnasium Riedberg & Country: DE

Project Partners

• IES RAMON Y CAJAL
• Istituto Comprensivo “Giuseppe Lombardo Radice”- Siracusa
• College Jean Moulin