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 scientific and health 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.
In this context, KMOP – Social Action and Innovation Centre (Greece), BUPNET (Germany), Einurd (Iceland), Xwhy (Lithuania), Amadora Inova (Portugal) and KMOP Skopje (MK) have joined forces to implement project URBAN – “Engaging youth with Urban Gardening Activities”. The project will 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 adult teaching; 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 package that will allow them to conduct interviews with young people and experts in urban gardening, in order to develop 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 scheme of six highly experienced partner organisations in Greece, Germany, Portugal, Lithuania, Iceland and North Macedonia, led by KMOP.
For more information about the project, you can visit its official website https://www.urbangardeningproject.eu/, Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/urbangardeningproject/ or send us an email at [email protected]!
