Blooming Schools

The partnership applied for this project because we recognized the urgent need to address several pressing challenges. At a global level, humans face issues such as climate changes and biodiversit...

“Blooming Schools” aimed to empower and equip young people in secondary schools with right tools, competences and skills to become environmental change-makers, raise awareness and take action with a dutiful approach. To achieve this, we aimed to a collaboration with schools and teachers who are heavily involved into their education. Youth at this age (13-18 years old) spend the most of their time at school, take examples and inspiration from their educators and choose their career path at the end of this journey based on their experiences, likes and dislikes. The specific objectives were: - Building the skills and competences of young people to carry out environmental actions - Increasing the confidence of teachers to support their students on an environmental practice journey - Increasing awareness about the importance of environmental citizenship - Supporting young people to develop their emotional resilience to carry on, in a way that ignites individual initiative - Helping young people realise their potential to create change - Contributing to a more sustainable future through increasing biodiversity and fight against climate change

The partnership applied for this project because we recognized the urgent need to address several pressing challenges. At a global level, humans face issues such as climate changes and biodiversity loss, which is occurring at alarming rates. These problems affect people’s wellbeing, and experts identified growing concerns regarding the climate or eco-anxieties of young people. Many feel worried about the environmental crises and experience hopelessness regarding their futures. At the schools’ level, teachers often lack the confidence to incorporate outdoor environments and nature-based learning into their subjects. This project sought to train them in using STEAM approaches in environmental projects, which aimed to empower educators and students alike. At the organisational level, we aimed to strengthen our collaborations with secondary schools to better engage young people aged 13-18, and develop quality resources to embed in our core works. Additionally, we worked on creating national environmental education activities focused on wildlife gardens to improve local biodiversity and targeting the Sustainable Development Goals.

“Blooming schools” achieved the following project results: 1. Producing a guideline for creating wildlife gardens in the Mediterranean in English, Greek and Portuguese, whilst creating wildlife gardens with teachers and students, thus increasing biodiversity on the school grounds and the community, and mitigating climate change. 2. Creating and implementing a collection of case studies/ project based activities demonstrating best practices in engaging young people with the sustainable development goals (SDGs) in schools 3. Promoting and applying STEAM subjects in students learning through project based activities with a focus on sustainability; supported by an online teacher training module and an award system tailored made per country for the participating schools; 4. Boosting youth groups with an interest on nature and particularly birds (Youth engagement strategy for eNGOs) 5. Creating a youth Vlogging academy for sustainability programme to empower young people to use the modern tools to reach the larger audience By achieving these project results, the main outcomes came into place among others: I. At young people and secondary school communities level: - Building the skills and competences of young people to carry out environmental actions (creativity, digital and media skills, green skills, environmental awareness, citizenship, sense of ownership for their ideas and actions, competences in STEAM subjects, communication, teamwork, self-confidence and resilience) - Increasing the confidence of teachers to support their students on an environmental practice journey using STEAM subjects - Improving their wellbeing by enabling them to have regular access to nature in the wildlife gardens created and giving them the tools to make changes in their community - Providing young people non-formal, extracurricular opportunities by creating youth groups and building friendships with other young people sharing the same interests II. At community level: - Through young people’s voice we reached policy makers (the Education Minister in Malta), to take better decisions for the school designs and encourage the creation of more wildlife gardens - Awareness amongst parents - Contributing to a more sustainable community through increasing biodiversity and fight against climate change III. At international and partnership level: - Engaging young people and teachers with the global sustainable development goals - Building the capacity of partners, educators and organisations outside the partnership to deliver high quality environmental programmes. - Strengthen our network of partners - Work together for our environment to mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss