Youth Commitment for climate Erasmus Project

Project Title

Youth Commitment for climate

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 2015

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy; Environment and climate change; Youth (Participation, Youth Work, Youth Policy)

Project Summary

We – the protagonists of this adventure – are four educational structures based in four European countries: the French organisation « Association Française des Petits Débrouillards », the Belgian organisation « Les Petits Débrouillards », the Romanian organisation Renato and the Italian cooperative society Controvento.

We are very active non-formal education actors in our respective countries. We have been working together for a long time on international projects. Several factors differentiate us, but there is one common point: it is the fact that we have placed youth and transition issues at the heart of our concerns and practices.

We are interested in Young people because they represent the vital energy of our societies. Thanks to them futur successes and failures will be built. They are the cradle of innovation. Despite these evidences, we find that young people have very little awareness of their role and often encounter difficulties in expressing a political voice.
For this reason, we – the youth workers – accompany them during this learning of autonomy: we go along with them so that they acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to participate in the civic and political life of their communities. Ecological transition is one of the major themes raised by young people in our local and international initiatives. It is also a priority for us educators: because the world around us is in transition and we claim to be active citizens, it is urgent to allow them to take ownership of the issues instead of suffering them. Because it is a global issue, which affects young people in their daily way of life, engages them and stimulates their action at the local level.
And finally because it is a strategic theme, which makes it possible to understand the ecological, economic and social crisis with a complex and transversal perspective.
So we started this project by retracing our most significant experiences of accompanying youth projects concerning transition issues. Then we documented them, with the intention of analyzing them and extracting the points of strength and weakness, common lines and differences to finally extract general lines that could be transferable for other actors.

We were accompanied in this evaluation process by the University of Bologna and the University of Aix-Marseille so that a neutral and external eye could help us to make this analysis of our own projects. This resulted in the writing of a methodological guide for all youth structures.

In addition to a methodological guide that would strengthen the skills of the structures, we also wanted to create a platform that would allow the various European youth initiatives on environmental issues to be connected, in order to network and reinforce each other.
Also to make visible all these initiatives and to demonstrate the commitment and concern of the youth on these important issus.

To reach these two results we have set up 1 transnational meeting, 3 learning and self-training seminars and 3 dissemination events.

Through the hudge dissemination of our work we hope we will not only strengthen the capacities of the structures but above all put the question of youth engagement on environmental issues at the heart of concerns of all educational actors.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 119363,58 Eur

Project Coordinator

ASSOCIATION FRANCAISE DES PETITS DEBROULLARDS & Country: FR

Project Partners

• Asociatia Renato
• Controvento Società Cooperativa Sociale ONLUS
• LE CLUB DES PETITS DEBROUILLARDS DE LA REGION BRUXELLOISE ASBL