Practical Sustainability Learning for Youth

The partners Meridian Learning Center and Accademia IRSEI applied for this project in pursuit of raising awareness about the ongoing projects working with the achievement of sustainable development goals both locally and globally. In the times of bad news avalanching on the modern youth and causing permanent anxiety, it is important to highlight the good news, positive solutions and examples that can be followed no matter where you are from. The partners wanted to create an educational non-formal learning module that could be universally used by both youth workers in their curriculum and youth likewise (as a self-study version). It was the ambition of the small-scale partnership to create an interactive digital product about practical sustainable development that could be used across the whole European dimension and contribute to more people, no matter their backgrounds and limitations, could become a part of a global and local sustainability process and contribute to positive global change driven not by fear and angst, but by solutions and development.

The main objective of the partnership was to raise awareness on the topic of environmental sustainability. It was also of utmost importance to shift the focus from environmental challenges to solutions, as well as bring attention towards the ongoing ecological and environmental initiatives in different countries and ways of replicating them. The partners drew the participants' attention that those who act are rarely people who are different from themselves - they are not politicians or movie stars, but enthusiasts like the participants who want to make a change, no matter where they live. The partners paid attention to involving more young people in the sustainable development action (including those with fewer opportunities) as well as increasing the target group's knowledge concerning practical solutions to environmental issues.

The project consisted of four parts and activities. Firstly it was the preparation and testing of the course contents on a target group from Denmark and Italy. Throughout 11 lessons, carried out by both the Danish and Italian staff, the feedback of the participants was thoroughly collected, analyzed and implemented in the following lessons and the eventual course. After the testing was over, the inspired participants took part in a practical clean-up event, which was conducted in Italy and Denmark, as well as other countries willing to participate, making the multiplier event global. The third activity included an international workshop on ongoing practical solutions with the participation of both course-testing participants as well as people who already work on sustainable projects. The fourth activity is the creation of the digital course itself, an online platform for enthusiasts to visit and learn about ongoing practical sustainable solutions that people around the world invent and implement. All four activities are interconnected and comprise an environmentally eco-friendly voyage for the participants, who digitally visited several many exciting countries, and learned about sustainable solutions and how they can act too.

The concrete outputs include: - an online self-study course with 30 lessons\over 30 videos, multiple quizzes, and opportunities for self-reflection. - several e-books on various sustainability topics that both the students and practitioners can use. The books are created in a way that allows their use in multiple types of seminars and institutions. - scripts and PowerPoint slides of 11 lessons that practitioners can deliver. - recordings of 11 online seminars on different topics of the course testing that can be used as a transformer module on such topics as the environment, geography, and entrepreneurship.