Climate for All: Games for Education on Sustainability 🌏

Introducing our very Own Climate for All! 🌍✨

We're thrilled to give a shoutout to our very own Climate for All, a game-changing project that's part of the All for Climate family. I know, I know, it can get a bit confusing, right? Let's dive in and unravel the story behind it!

Our brilliant mastermind, Antonis, from the All for Climate team, saw the need to revolutionise education on sustainability, and what better way than games? 🎮✨ That's how Climate for All was born!

With a mission to foster sustainability and climate action skills in young adults and youth workers, Climate for All is breaking new ground.

Climate for All aims to revolutionise education on sustainability through innovative games that engage and empower the next generation. From 2023 to 2026, the project team (a collective with members of 5 partner organisations involved in international youth work, games-based learning and climate activism) will develop a range of games that aim to build skills aligned with GreenComp, the European sustainability competence framework, targeting young people across Europe and beyond.

The games can be of various types, from board games, card games, outdoor games, tabletop role-playing games, to live-action role-play adventures. They will also all be available to download, print and play at home for free!

By conducting thorough research, game development, and playtesting, the Climate for All team will ensure their games are effective and impactful. After the games are developed, facilitators from even more organisations and informal groups around the world will be trained to host their own sessions using these games, multiplying the project's reach and enabling more individuals to make a real difference.

Erasmus+: A major win!

‌Such an ambitious project cannot possibly hope to succeed without funding, of course. This is where we have some great news to announce! A few months ago, the project team applied for an Erasmus+ grant to secure enough funds for the project to take off.

But what is Erasmus+?

Erasmus+ is the EU's programme to support education, training, youth and sport in Europe. It provides funding and opportunities for students, staff, and volunteers to study, work, or cooperate in different fields across Europe and beyond. The current programme that runs from 2021-2027 has a projected budget of 26 billion euros. It places a strong focus on social inclusion, the green and digital transitions, and promoting young people’s participation in democratic life. Erasmus+ Key Action 2, in particular, is dedicated to the creation of "strategic partnerships". These partnerships for cooperation are transnational projects designed to develop and share innovative practices and promote cooperation, peer learning, and exchanges of experiences in the fields of education, training, and youth. This is the grant the Climate for All team applied for, and... just received the amazing news that the grant has been approved!

What does this mean in practice?

Simply put, it means that from 2023 to 2026, Climate for All will receive a staggering 250.000€ to implement the activities of the project! A detailed budget was included in the 64-page long application for the grant (yes, the process is quite bureaucratic, but it makes projects like this possible), so the team already knows where the money will go. If you're curious, there are 6 periods of remotely managed activities, 5 intensive international events, and over 30 smaller local activities planned within 5 "work packages". Most of the budget will go to the activities themselves, as Erasmus+ is structured around mobilities. The grant is enough to finance the activities of the project and guarantee a safe take-off for the project, but additional funds would ensure the people involved in the project also get adequately remunerated for their hard work. But then again, the project is designed with that in mind. As you would expect from an All for Climate project, all expenses and additional donations will be made public in full transparency on Open Collective!

A new hope?

Antonis has a few words to say about his motivation for the project:

Last Monday saw the hottest global temperature ever recorded, only for that record to be broken... on Tuesday. Scientists have been warning about the dangers of climate change for about half a century now, while decision makers are doing too little too late, expecting business as usual to somehow lead to different outcomes. Young people in particular will bare the brunt of it, while their voices are consistently being ignored. I've been observing that since... I was young myself, as a climate activist early on, as well as as a youth worker afterwards, with my eco-anxiety getting the best of me far too often in the recent years. Is there any hope then?

When I joined All for Climate, the feelings of negativity I was carrying with me got balanced by the systemic nature of our work and, yes, brought hope! It was around the same time that I joined another project where I met the wonderful people from the other partner organisations of the Climate for All project (it was a training course on designing LARP adventures for educational purposes, which I guess explains things) and my hopes got even higher with the community I met there! But the lightbulbs in my head also started lighting up. What if we could combine the two? That's when the first ideas about the project came, and I immediately discussed them with the people there and started building a team. A few months and several meetings later, we put together a detailed plan for the project, and here we are! We're all proud of what we have designed together and eager to put it to play!

Join us in celebrating Climate for All's mission to create a more sustainable future through engaging in transformative education.

Simply subscribe to this newsletter and share it with your friends, to stay up to date with news from the project, as well as all the other cool collectives All for Climate is supporting!

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