Grow Green! - Environmental Education for All

The idea of the project gained shape based on the research carried out about the increasing pan-European interest in environmental and sustainable development education and the recognition of the urgent need to implement sustainable development strategies due to the negative effects of human behaviour on the environment. We also studied the ‘European Green Deal Communication’ (2019) extensively which made and appeal to all institutions to engage with pupils, parents, and the wider community with the view of raising awareness to the actions needed in the environmental and climate change fields. The main needs that the ‘Grow Green!’ project addressed was the lack of support underserved local communities received in becoing more environmentally-friendly. They did not benefit of dedicated educational programmes and very few organisations received the necessary support to work with them. We carried out extensive studies in he field and discovered that underserved communities lack information, knowledge and know-how with regards to environmental issues and the importance of caring for the environment.

As for the main achievement of the ‘Grow Green!’ project, we aimed at supporting underserved local communities to become more environment-friendly by offering comprehensive educational programmes for the members of the community and by sustaining the development of educational organisations working with them. We addressed the main ‘influencers’ of the communities, namely parents and educators in order to better achieve the goals of our project. We increased the competences of min. 50 non-formal educators who deal with environmental issues within under-served communities on how to organise and carry out parental environment education in order to make an impact on the younger generations, too. We also raised awareness and developed knowledge, skills and attitudes (KSA) of min. 90 parents of young children in order to ‘grow greener’ and become more of an environmentally-friendly future generation. Parents are key elements in raising more environmentally-friendly future generations, therefore the project emphasised on improving the accessibility and increasing the take-up of environmental education of this target group.

Within the Grow Green! Project we implemented the following activities: 1). Project Management and implementation A comprehensive project management procedure was set up for whole duration of the project, which was set in the form of a Project Management Plan. Within this activity three transnational meetings were organised: a Kick-off Meeting in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, an Interim Meeting in Koper, Slovenia and a Final Meeting in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. 2). Train of Trainers Two 5-day Train of Trainers programmes were carried out within this activity, one in each partner country 3). Local workshops for parents Two local workshops were organised, one in each partner country, with the participation of min. 60 parents. 4). Developing educational videos for parents As the main Intellectual Output of the project, three educational videos were created, addressed to parents. 5). Online webinar for non-formal educators Two online webinars were carried out for non-formal educators, one in each partner country, that involved a min. of 30 educators in total.

The project attained tangible and intangible results, namely: - three educational videos were created and disseminated, the aim of which was to prepare parents to raise awareness and offer environmental education to their children, but also becoing greener role models to their children; - an online webinar was carried out in each partner country the aim of which was to prepar non-formal educators in offering comprehensive environmental education programmes to parents; - as another result, the competences of non-formal environmental education providers were increased and developed; - overall parents’ environmental competences and attitudes as well as skills of protecting the environment were increased considerably.