<< Objectives >>The Tale project responds to the urgent need to transform into a more climate-friendly and sustainable society. Tale explores solutions to this challenge by engaging with communities, social movements, and grassroots initiatives to upscale innovative green practices. The main objective is to provide new insights in how to further sustainability and green transition in adult learning and education institutions and communities.<< Implementation >>The partners will run innovation groups using transformative learning methods and consisting of the staff from adult organisations and the activists from grassroots initiatives. The goal is to examine how we can learn from each other to further green transition. In addition, the project consortium utilises peer learning, organises events for adult education community and publishes recommendations to policy makers on how adult education can contribute to green transition.<< Results >>The Tale project will help adult learning and education organisations to adopt greener practices in their operations and find new ways to work with their surrounding communities to contribute to the green transition of our society. The project will produce knowledge, events, tools, experiences, methods and recommendations on how to use transformative learning to further green transition, and help mainstream the innovative bottom-up practices of the grassroots initiatives.

<< Objectives >>1) To make research about regenerative communities and community-led initiatives representing the fight against climate change visible and available for the adult education sector, through a web platform and an accessible database, gathering and showcasing ecovillage related research and resources. 2) To increase cooperation between researchers and adult educators through a growing and cross-sectoral ‘community of practice’.3) To practice cooperation and increase visibility of each sector.<< Implementation >>There will be 'Communities of Practice development' nationally and at European level, for enhanced cooperation between adult educators and researchers. A database will make research visible and available and a web platform will gather relevant information and create a support structure for the CoP. Four online Research Colloquiums will be arranged, for people to meet. Two Transnational Project Meetings will be held.<< Results >>- A web platform that is being used, showcasing ecovillage research in a user-friendly database- A Community of Practise at European level. - Online Research Colloquiums as a way to blend sectors.

Climate change, economic inequality and social divisions urgently require innovative responses at multiple levels. The Paris Agreement, UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and Europe 2020 Strategy demonstrate substantial will at national and international levels to tackle these challenges, although actual implementation can be difficult and slow. At the local level though, there is a vibrant movement of community-led initiatives on climate change and sustainability. These Community-Led Initiatives (CLIs) are transformative social innovations that involve new ways of being, organising, negotiating and acting. There are thousands of such initiatives across Europe, from ecovillages to community energy cooperatives, social enterprises to zero-waste initiatives. Several recent transnational research projects have highlighted that the prospects for rapid transitions to sustainability are highest where municipal authorities collaborate with community-led initiatives. A 2018 paper from the European Economic and Social Committee on ‘Boosting climate actions by non-State actors’ reflects this growing recognition also at EU and global levels, and in February 2018, the Council of the EU for the first time acknowledged the critical role of local communities in addressing climate challenges. It is to fully leverage this potential, that the Ecovillage Transition in Action project and its outputs were designed. In our networks we see examples of engaged rural communities working for positive change who feel unsupported by local government. We also see many municipalities with positive goals and a determination to act, who are struggling to build genuinely collaborative relationships with local citizens and initiatives. We therefore aim to provide open and innovative education and materials designed to support both educators and adult learners develop key competences in cross-sectoral partnership building, community building, participatory design and collaboration between local authorities, communities and citizens in primarily rural areas. We wish to: - Grow the capacity of educators, local initiatives, local authorities, citizens and and community organisers to facilitate this crucial but complicated collaboration, and to teach those skills and capacities to others. - Provide accessible and transferable educational tools, trainings, curricula, and methods for bringing together CLIs and local government actors, and increase the depth and quality of collaboration between them. - Create and prototype a set of replicable trainings that support our target groups to acquire key competencies and skills for what we call Ecovillage Transition - a process where municipal authorities and local citizens work together to develop alternative pathways to local development, based on a holistic framework of social, cultural, economic and ecological regeneration. Through an inventory of good practice, successful examples and challenges in collaboration between local governments and community-led initiatives in rural locations, we will create an Ecovillage Transition Toolkit integrating practical experience and research – designed to foster partnership, engagement and participatory, holistic local development.A central element of the project is the development of new curricula for Ecovillage Transition, as well as a Training of Trainers module – both providing innovative materials and pedagogies for community-led initiatives, local authorities, educators and active citizens to work together for positive impactFinally, our Ecovillage Transition Tracker will combine elements of impact assessment, design thinking and participatory monitoring and evaluation. It aims to provide local initiatives and authorities with an innovative and practical framework and collaborative methodology for tracking the ongoing implementation of multi-stakeholder projects in ways that ensure dynamic steering, ongoing learning, and goals that matter to local communities. The EU-funded TESS research project noted that if 5 % of EU citizens engaged in community-led climate mitigation initiatives, 85% of EU-28 countries would achieve their 2020 emissions targets. TESS also highlighted the awareness raising, social cohesion, creation of local livelihoods and wealth retention, and the feeling of empowerment that citizens experience by working together to bring about change - and that 63% of the surveyed CLIs have been replicated elsewhere. Inspired, we aim to contribute to- rapidly scaling and spreading the type of innovative, sustainable and inclusive local solutions and impact already implemented by ecovillages and other community-led initiatives. - increased capacity for partnership-building and collaboration between CLIs and municipalities across Europe.- the development of innovative education for sustainable local development, capable of increasing collective capacity to take direct action to achieve the UN SDGs and climate agreements

CONTEXT & BACKGROUNDThe project has been designed with the following perspectives in mind:•The widely agreed need for massive levels of transformative change to achieve a sustainable low carbon future •The development of good practice in transformative learning•The relevance of transformative learning to behaviour change in this context, for individuals and communities•The emergence of blended learning methods and systems, which can combine the best aspects of digital learning (e.g. massive affordable accessibility) and experiential learning (deep engagement, inward and outward transformation) OBJECTIVESOur specific objectives are to:1) Provide a context for adult educators to improve their competences in delivering blended transformative learning for civic engagement in community-led initiatives.2) Increase reach and improve access, quality, attractiveness and coordination of educational delivery of transformative adult education initiatives across Europe that are supporting the social-ecological transition.3) Identify, pool, encourage and spread related social and educational innovations. 4) exploit results of other related EU projects.Achieving these objectives aims to bring about massive personal and community-led change over time by supporting people to engage actively in the socio-ecological transition in response to the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Climate Agreement and related goals. PARTICIPANTS15 people will engage in core BLAST project meetings, with 250 in-person attendees of multiplier events, and at least as many predicted on-line participants, the target being many more. Through dissemination activities across the partnership’s extensive networks, the objective is that the beneficiaries of the BLAST project outputs beyond the life of the project will be many thousands. The participants in the BLAST project is composed of a mix of people representing bigger networks of community-led initiatives and smaller adult education providers.They have complementary domains of expertise (such as regenerative design, community resilience, cosmopolitan communication, or social innovation) and have prior long-term collaborative engagement with each other (e.g. through ECOLISE), and more recent new linkages.ACTIVITIES The projects activities are to produce a set of 4 inter-related Intellectual Outputs, linked to a set of Training and Multiplier events that are designed to generate deep and long lasting benefits for the Community of Practice and the wider partnerships, network and collaborations that ReLeaP partners are engaged with. The project activities also include online and Transnational Project meetings through which partners will progress the tasks to deliver the project outputs, project evaluation, and extensive dissemination to ensure wide and ongoing take-up of the project’s outputs.METHODOLOGY: BLENDED LEARNING AND COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICEBlended learning can overcome the disadvantages of face-to-face and online learning for achieving Transformative Learning. This is coupled with the Community of Practice approach (Etienne Wenger) for sustaining and extending collective learning and providing a nurturing space for innovations.• Specialised knowledge and related conversations can be accessed online, leaving precious face-to-face time for whole person experiential and social learning.• The participants are engaged with online peer group when they work on their projects at home. As the pioneers of change who may face resistance in their social environment, this is very helpful, providing confirmation and support, which maintains behaviour change.• Participating occasionally in a face-to-face module enhances an online course by increasing the identification with the group and enabling embodied experiences.RESULTS, IMPACT & LONG-TERM BENEFITSThe project will produce a set of results which enable adult educators to deliver transformative learning affordably at scale, in highly accessible ways. It will deliver training to educators that pilots and develops a methodology for maximising the effectiveness of educators and learners to engage with, use and benefit from the platform and system that the project delivers. The impact will be that Europe's communities will be set up to have access to high quality transformative learning that will help bringing about significant shifts to sustainable low carbon lifestyles and communities.POTENTIAL LONGER TERM BENEFITSThe potential longer term benefits include massive shifts to low carbon living, health creating and circular resource efficient lifestyles, resilient low carbon communities, with healthy local and regional economies and ecosystems that deliver healthy food and clean energy to the communities they serve in Europe, and beyond.

Climate change is a human problem, caused by humans, affecting humans, and requiring a human-centric solution. CAMPAIGNers aims to make low-carbon lifestyles a major part of the solution by identifying lifestyle transformation potential, and associated barriers and enablers across 5 continents and 16 major cities with over 20 mil. residents. Feasible pathways to GHG mitigation are developed to include the empirically validated lifestyle changes, and are applied to the principal integrated modelling tools used in the EU to provide robust insights into the system-level impacts of large-scale lifestyle transformation. CAMPAIGNers builds on previous consortium-led projects that substantially improved the understanding of societal structures and interventions that encourage lifestyle shifts, and identified limitations to the existing evidence-base. Namely, current lifestyle transformation research is either limited to narrow, specific contexts or groups, or deals in hypothetical behaviours where most citizens do not have real experiences to draw on. CAMPAIGNers’ ground-breaking approach overcomes these drawbacks by implementing a ‘goal-setting network’, where over 100,000 citizens receive and create challenges to try out tailored adaptations to their daily routines via an engaging app. Their responses to these challenges, associated treatments, and short questionnaires will deliver unprecedented data of behavioural processes, (local) barriers to change, and motivators, allowing for empirically-based scientific support of cities in crafting policies to encourage low-carbon lifestyles. Together with local, national and EU policy makers insights are analysed regarding the ‘right-level-to-act’ and policy-ready recommendations are jointly derived. A workshop in the EU Parliament, hosted by First-Vice President Ms. McGuinness, and supported by 9 more MEPs from 6 countries and 4 political parties, will ensure high-level feedback and contribute to consensus building.