Youth Climate Empowerment

The background for applying for this Erasmus+ project was to give young people at VET and Upper Secondary Schools in five regions in Europe a voice within a topic which is so insurmountable as the...

The objectives of this Erasmus+ project was for students and teachers to work with climate change, to gain knowledge of this vast problem and to work with climate solutions for their own school and municipality. As climate change is a heavy burden for young people, we therefore focused on the students’ abilities to make a change, and work with climate change in a positive way, where the focus was more what we in different European regions can do, instead of focusing on what we cannot do. Therefore, the logo of the project was a climate handprint, which signifies focusing on all the good you can do to enlarge your handprint instead of focusing on your footprint which tells about the CO2 of each product you consume . Moreover, the students should also work with climate campaigns targeted at students at schools and the local municipality. Apart from working with climate change, as 5 project partners and students from four countries had to cooperate, one of the objectives was also intercultural cooperation, to obtain knowledge of how young people live, think and feel in different regions of Europe.

During the four LTT activities, the students and teachers worked with climate solutions and climate campaigns on the basis of the solutions. The students worked in international groups of 5 students, one student from each region involved. In LTT activity 1 and 3, the students worked with climate solutions, and in activity 2 and 4 with climate campaigns and awareness. To help the students finding solutions and making campaigns, the students received classes and tutorials about the UN SDGs, talked to schools' management about what the schools already had done on climate change and share it with their international group, the students got knowledge from representatives working with climate change at the municipalities of Zwolle and Køge, the students had to find existing climate activites in their municipality and share it with the other students in their group, and how to do campaigning, how to make a video, texts for Instagram, schools’ homepages, marketing of campaigns, memes and how to write articles for newspaper frontpage.

In LTT 1, the output of this Erasmus+ project was to find two climate solutions at school level. The students came up with a Green Day each year, where the students receive information about climate change, stakeholders are invited to talk about climate change, and the students can be involved in doing clothes swapping, go by bus, train, bycycle to school and not drive or being driven to school in a car, or join car pooling with several students in one car. The other solution was Food waste in schools. The students came up with solutions such as plantbased food in the school's canteen - if you have one, to plant trees on the school premisis every time you go on a student trip, that each school has its own vegetable garden, so the students can have locally produced food and be involved themselves in this process. In LTT II, the students had to make campaigns on the basis of the solutions of LTT I. The students produced videos, Instagram posts and text for Intra to create awareness of the two solutions the students came up with in LTT I. In LTT III, the students worked in cooperation with the municipality of Zwolle with how Zwolle has been affected by the climate change. Here the students worked with heat stress and green areas to reduce temperatures. Besides this, the students made an online newspaper front page where they both worked with solutions for these two climate problems, but also inspiration from their own municipalities as to what they do to curb climate change. 10 different front pages with solutions and inspiration were produced and presented. In LTT IV, the students worked with municipalities regarding food and packaging, energy consumtion, buildings and landscapes, mobility and fashion. Here each group produced a video, 5 Instagram posts, an article and a meme. This they did on the basis of a presentation by the Green Ambassador from the Municipality of Køge and detailed instructions for each topic with ideas to work with within their frame. See Teams below LTT IV – Instructions to students group 1 – 10.