Urban gardening is not only a way to grow your vegetables more sustainably, it is also a way to meet other people and acquire new skills. It offers a lot of benefits, but mostly it bonds communities. Urban gardens provide an opportunity for strengthening social inclusion through constructive activities, contributions to the community, relationship building and interpersonal skills’ development.
The project seeks to raise awareness and educate local community members – including vulnerable and threatened with exclusion young people, migrants/refugees – through setting up and maintaining urban gardens. The added value of project URBAN also includes its contribution to the growing discussion about the climate change adaptation, Ecosystem and sustainable development.
URBAN will achieve its goals by developing training and learning resources, which support the professional development of practitioners and educators in the field of youth work; actively involving local youth threatened of marginalization; developing a training programme based on activities connected with setting up and maintaining urban gardens.
The project has officially kicked off in July, with the first partners’ meeting taking place online. Partners have already developed the research approach that provides guidelines for structured interviews with young people and experts in urban gardening in each partner country. The results of the interviews will be fed into the “Eco URBAN Gardening Handbook”, which will be a best practice handbook about urban gardening.
URBAN project is funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Commission and will run for 24 months (June 2020 – May 2022). It is implemented by a consortium of six highly experienced partner organisations in Greece, Germany, Portugal, Lithuania, Iceland and North Macedonia, led by KMOP – Social Action and Innovation Centre.
For more information please visit the official website and follow us on Facebook page or send us an email to info@urbangardening.eu
