Youth´s BIO Learning-Empowering-Nurturing-Sharing Erasmus Project

Project Title

Youth´s BIO Learning-Empowering-Nurturing-Sharing

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 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Environment and climate change; Youth (Participation, Youth Work, Youth Policy) ; Social/environmental responsibility of educational institutions

Project Summary

Climate change is a topic unlike any other, it is also a truly democratic and unifying one, where everyone has a part to play in regardless of their background or the place they live in . This is also the postulate of a recent major social movement of youth that has arisen in response to the inadequate and insufficient measures taken so far. However, if we all need to start to act, what does this practically imply for the way in which we work with youth? Those who are young, and unprivileged, now will be affected most by climate change: What can they practically do about climate change while what they feel is fear or doubts? Do they, and we all, actually know what it implies and how big is our individual actions´ role? Do they realise that many everyday solutions, socially unpopular for their ¨low-monetary-status¨stigma, are actually keys to a sustainable life? 

Taking these considerations into account, we formed our Strategic Partnership and we plan to create our IO as a creative and innovative guide thanks to which youth workers will be able to both deepen and acquire an ability necessary to work with young people’s need for climate change action and put in practise teamwork strategies for groups of young people at risk of social exclusion. We also wish for the climate change ¨lens¨, BIOLENS, to become a prism through which our organisations (and other entities) start to look and work regardless of their main field of specialisation.

Our project will also bring significant improvement of professional competences for members of our 3 NGOs (Polish Foundation Medeina, Spanish NGO PASOS and Italian Oriel Association). These improvements will be particularly visible in the climate change´s innovative emotional and social (gender, intercultural and ethical) aspect, social inclusion. They will also raise the quality of their professional and personal performance and will be able to use the acquired skills in practise by forming Action Groups for young people.
 
The objectives of the “BIOLENS: ” project are therefore the following:

GO1. To exchange and generate transversal knowledge in the field of adaptation to climate change for youth workers from non-formal and in-formal education sector.
(Why? The European Commission called for the transnational actions regarding climate change and youth).

GO2. To generate transversal materials in the field of adaptation to climate change for youth workers from non-formal and in-formal education sector.
(Why? Education is an obligation for State Parties of the The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change but it hardly appears in climate policies as they tend to target industry, general society or, recently, formal education field but rarely regarding Third Sector ).

Go3. To reinforce the individual responsibility among youth in order to promote responsible behaviour in relation to the consequences of climate change.
(Why? As we stated before, youth is the driving force of the recent Climate Strikes movement and it is a perfect time to further engage them, canalising their emotions into eco-positive actions).

GO4: To support awareness-raising and action on climate change through the development and distribution of dissemination materials and events.
(Why? In 2013 the EU adaptation strategy was adopted and awareness raising and mainstreaming of adaptation were considered crucial in this process).

GO5: To build other NGOs´ capacity and strengthen the cooperation among entities.
(Why? It is a high time for climate change to be introduced as a transversal topic in any NGO regardless of its scope of work and through trainings, IO´s distribution and dissemination we will bring together many entities).

These objectives will be achieved by the following main activities planned:

3 project meetings
Best practices exchange through 3 LTTAs
The period of joint intellectual work on writing the IO
Trying out and testing the intellectual output via workshops before its final version.
3 conferences to disseminate the IO in each of the participating countries and dissemination strategy
Internal workshops for our organisations
Action Groups programme for youth led on the basis of the experiences from the course and skills transferred in the book.

The sustainable impact of the BIOLENS project among the participating organisations will be based on the increased confidence of our youth workers in addressing the challenges of promoting climate change action, improving the quality of their work and better social integration of young people they work with. In addition, we will also contribute to creation of an international network of organisations which may result in future projects.

We also expect that through the dissemination we will inform and convince the key decision-makers from the non-formal and informal education sector of the importance of including the work on climate change in all spheres of youth’s education and third sector entities’ work.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 123840 Eur

Project Coordinator

FUNDACJA WSPIERANIA ROZWOJU MEDEINA & Country: PL

Project Partners

• Plataforma de alternativas sostenibles y solidarias
• ORIEL ETS