Green Elephant Foundation / Fundacja Zielony Slon

Fundacja „Zielony Słoń“ / The Green Elephant Foundation® is a nongovernmental organization based in Lublin, Poland, the European Youth
Capital 2023. We organize educational programs and events both within Poland and internationally, with key locations including Zakopane, the winter capital of
Poland in the Tatra Mountains, the surrounding areas of Lublin, and the rural regions of eastern Poland.
The founder, Mr. Jacek Rębacz is an author of several novels being published by the biggest Polish publishing houses. This is also the reason we also support and promote literacy, readership and help to protect valuable books.
We focus on educational activities aimed to face social problems like violence, discrimination, racism, hate speech, problem of inadequate level of education, problems which the youths encounter while starting their adventure on the labor market, projects aimed for raising entrepreneurial and civic awareness, and projects on ecological awareness, projects focused on sustainable development, Green Policies, reduction of the human footprint.

We also implement projects aimed to set workplacements abroad, support vocational education of young people, create online educational products and solutions. We are implementing projects with individual career development, vocational courses and traineeships on national level, aimed at adult unemployed, disabled people and recently embracing also the Ukrainian refugees of all ages.

We are officially registered as a publishing institution in Poland no. PL/e-ISBN/12513 with own publications and we are also officially registered training institution no. 2.06/00062/2019.

We are also granted Quality Label enabling us to provide sending and hosting opportunities for European Volunteers under European Solidarity Corps 2020-1-PL01-ESC52-083032.

In the digital field we cooperate with a game developer who sometimes creates products in our projects: https://rarykos.itch.io/

In the same time we are a cultural organization which is proud of supporting literacy and reading. We have a number of old books under our care including unique printouts which dates back to XIX and XVIII century. We promote the culture of reading and preserving the books. We also promote other traditional activities like local handcrafts - often organize workshops with people who make homemade foodstuffs.

We have organized 20+ international youth educational events, youth exchanges and courses, minimum week-long, in Poland, for approximately 500-600 youth workers and young people in total from all over EU and the partner countries, under various financing programes.
Within the scope of our duties we have also organized or led several educational events in Slovakia, Georgia, Malta.
We have supported ovet 70 students of local vocational schools by sending them to traineeships abroad under our Erasmus+ VET projects to Spain, Italy and Portugal for several weeks.
We have involved over 300 people both youths and older participants into foreign mobilities and training courses under Erasmus+ youth and adult sector, so they were able to develop themselves in multicultural environment.
Within national projects, we have provided career consultancy, vocational courses and paid workplacements for 30 unemployed people in the region of Lubelskie under RPO WL (RPLU.10.04.00-06-0029/18) and for 50 disabled people (national range, „(Od)Ważni na starcie!” ABS/000004/03/D).
We have also involved almost 200 youths from Lithuania and Ukraine into bilateral youth exchange projects which we hosted in Poland.
We are co-author of the guide on youth projects published by the Polish Erasmus+ National Agency https://www.frse.org.pl/czytelnia/przewodnik-dla-wnioskodawcow-polsko-ukrainskiej-rady-wymiany-mlodziezy
and many other publications resulting from our projects,avalaible here https://www.greenelephant-foundation.com/resources

We have been implementing a number of Erasmus+ strategic partnership projects, e.g.:
https://www.improvlang.com/ Our own Erasmus+ KA220 project in the school education sector aimed at development of learning tools based on specific drama techniques and evaluation method.
https://www.greenelephant-foundation.com/unitedinculture - the objective of the project is to provide welcoming services to the 200 Ukrainian refugees in Latvia and Poland so that the refugees get to know better our countries and our people and at the same time gain positive emotions to process the experiences in their home country and on their escape. The specific objectives of the project are:
- to provide Ukrainian refugees an opportunity to learn Latvian/Polish language through available language courses;
- to provide Ukrainian refugees an opportunity to get to know Latvian/Polish culture;
https://www.greenelephant-foundation.com/seduca
The project is aimed to prevent behaviors related to gender violence with the following objectives: Identify what content, what frequency and what quality have sexual education programs destined to young people in the countries of our consortium, carry out a research, develop a guide of good practices, establish a prevention and action manual that explains what to do in case such attitudes appear, train formal and non-formal teaching professionals for an education in gender equality, providing them with material for this, establish a support and information program for families in the area of sexual education that facilitates their intervention in the family context.

https://www.greenelephant-foundation.com/youngwomenleaders - Erasmus+ strategic partnership project aimed at empowering young women to become leading activitist in local societies with use of developed learning tools.

https://www.greenelephant-foundation.com/livingheritage4all
https://www.greenelephant-foundation.com/echo Both projects are aimed to increase the accessibility of training in culture and arts; to raise the opportunities to explore European intangible cultural heritage by using digital means; to promote social inclusion of people with disadvantaged background through culture and arts; to encourage intergenerational learning and transfer of traditional skills; to motivate and empower people to start businesses based on intangible cultural heritage.

https://www.greenelephant-foundation.com/womanviolence - Project aimed to exchange best practices to counteract gender violence and abuse among adult women, to obtain new tools and methodologies to counteract gender violence, to increase the awareness level regarding the abuse of power experienced by adult women.

https://www.greenelephant-foundation.com/weareable
Project aimed at raising young people's awareness of plastics in clothing throughout the entire product life cycle, to develop alternatives for an environmentally conscious and yet affordable way of dealing with fashion, to train peer guides and youth workers in order to achieve the widest possible dissemination of the project results beyond the duration of the project.

https://www.greenelephant-foundation.com/ecofriendlychangesinyouthlifestyles - Bilateral Polish-Slovakian partnership to help young people promote and develop habits supporting the sustainable development and the life of health and sustainability.

Visegrad+ strategic partnership project (https://www.greenelephant-foundation.com/visegrad) with an e-learning platform (now available at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8Vj8PO6qKCsr4ZOAqktS1DB7pvNhAJ4J .
The project aimed to increase the quality of youth work by exchanging best practises and ideas regarding creative start-ups in rural areas - new businesses that are using the traditional intangible heritage of rural areas in a contemporary way by using modern ICT (e-commerce, e- platforms, applications, distant work etc.).