APPLICATIONS CLOSED: “‘Concrete jungle: urban gardening as a youth work tool for social inclusion of refugees and other young people with fewer opportunities ”

For the project application “‘Concrete jungle: urban gardening as a youth work tool for social inclusion of refugees and other young people with fewer opportunities ” we are looking for project partners - organisations - that directly has with experience/expertise in social work with our target group and/or gardening as a tool for youthwork.

“Gardening is a survival skill,” says Ron Finley, the inspiration for urban gardener from deprivileged neighbourhood of Los Angeles. Rarely explored in the school, almost never in non-formal education, urban gardening can be seen as one of the most powerful tools for building communities, teaching participative and active citizenship, creativity, developing entrepreneurial skills, taking one of the most basic needs - food supply - in own hands.

Gardening as a tool for non-formal education has not only the opportunities of exploring the healthy lifestyle choices, learning the origins of the food and understanding nature - we also see it as a tool of empowerment of young people, tool to learn practical skills for own life and work market, to explore possibilities of improving the footprint of the urban ecosystems, and, the most important, building community around it and bringing new people into the community.

From the other side, being aware of the necessity for bottom-up initiatives to welcome new people in the local communities, we would like to adjust the gardening youth work experience to the current European situation and explore the opportunities to support the social inclusion of the young people with fewer opportunities (esp. social, cultural, economical or geographical obstacles), with focus on youthwork with target group - newcommers, or refugees.

Therefore with the project “‘Concrete jungle: urban gardening as a youth work tool for social inclusion of refugees and other young people with fewer opportunities ” we aim to extract the knowledge of community building, gardening skills within the specific frame of marginalized youth groups, exchange with experiences, start basis for European network and create a tutorial for urban gardening as a tool for inclusion in the local communities.

The project is based on 2 activities - 6 days seminar on gardening and social inclusion in June 2016 and 10 days training course with practical experience and learning the tools for youth work in August 2016.
We aim to work with 6 other partnerorganisations - another one from Germany and 5 from ERASMUS+ Program or Partner countries.

More detailed information about the project please find in the attached PDF file!

If You are interested to join the board, please contact us until 15th of January latest by writing an email to gartenlabor@trial-error.org!
See You on board!

Yours,
Kulturlabor TRial&Error