Ripples - Sailing for Creative Climate Action Across the

Background Ripples is a one-year long project of collaboration between the three Nordic region youth-led organizations working in the fields of performing art, sustainability, and education. We are Acting for Climate – from Norway, The Hawila project – from Denmark, and Norpas Ry – from Finland: young artists, activists, sailors and youth workers that come together to network, exchange skills, develop methods and grow. We recognise that the youth of our generation live today under pressure of various emotional stressors – climate crises, COVID pandemic, uncertainty over the future. We are part of that youth. And we want to do something about it. We are uniting our capacities, resources and talents to co-create an impactful performance with circus, storytelling and non-formal activities. Through the performance we will invite our audiences to reflect on ecogrief, a phenomenon increasingly experienced today by the youth. COVID put a pause to the massive youth engagement of the climate strikers. In the Year of European Youth 2022, we seek to re-empower young people in their political involvement for environmental action, and we see contemporary performing art as our way to do it. In summer 2022 we will sail on the 100-year-old grand, two-masted sail ship Hawila across the Baltic Sea to deliver our co-created performance to local communities in harbours in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. The ship acts as a site-specific stage, our accommodation and means of transport. With our project we aim to reach out to people, create space to reflect, and transform a story of destruction into a story of hope and regeneration. We target to reach more than 5000 people, to engage with 200 youth in non formal learning activities and workshops, and to reach a digital audience of at least one million viewers with audiovisual material of the project. If action triggers action - can our art create a ripple effect for climate action that can spread across the sea? Along the journey, there will be much to learn and to learn from each other. With the project we plan to address the needs of our organizations to grow individually and as parts of the collaboration. Hence, we will focus on learning processes, exchanging experiences, sharing the skills, building capacities and expanding the networks. In our teams there are disadvantaged youth, and we prioritize to involve them in the management team to facilitate their professional development. We aim to work together to help each other grow. As a group of young artists concerned with climate change, we see a need to make touring as sustainable as possible. And we put this forward as one of our cross-cutting goals under the project. Objectives There are three main achievements we aim for: # through our performance and activities we aim to re-empower young people in the Nordic region in their political involvement for environmental action; # through our collaboration we aim to increase recognition of our organizations and work we do, to improve quality of our work, reinforce our network of