Green City Builders: A Non-Formal Education Toolkit for Exploring Urban Sustainability with Youth

Aims of the tool

This toolkit aims to provide youth workers, trainers, and educators with structured, participatory workshop designs that enable young people to critically explore sustainability in urban contexts. Specifically, it aims to

· Raise awareness of the interconnection between environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability in everyday urban life.

· Equip facilitators with replicable, step-by-step activities that use experiential learning, simulation, gamification, digital storytelling, and peer-to-peer methods to engage diverse groups of young people.

· Foster critical thinking, empathy, and active citizenship by enabling participants to experience real-world dynamics such as circular economy, housing inequality, democratic governance, and energy transition through hands-on simulations.

· Support youth-led facilitation by providing activities specifically designed to be prepared and delivered by young people themselves, building their leadership and communication skills in the process.

Description of the tool

This toolkit offers seven ready-to-use workshop designs developed and tested during the Erasmus+ youth exchange "Green City Builders" (Agropoli, Italy, 2025). Each activity uses non-formal education methodologies to engage young people with urban sustainability across its three dimensions: environmental, social, and economic.

The workshops range from interactive games that introduce key sustainability concepts (taboo, charades, quizzes) to immersive simulations where participants experience industrial symbiosis and circular economy dynamics, housing discrimination and ethnic enclave formation, and democratic decision-making through simulated local elections. Other activities include digital storytelling on everyday sustainable habits, a living museum on renewable energy sources, collaborative urban planning with budget constraints, and upcycling art from collected waste.

Each workshop includes a description of objectives, step-by-step methodology, and expected learning outcomes. The activities are designed for intercultural groups of 20 to 40 participants aged 18 to 30, but can be easily adapted to different group sizes, age ranges, and contexts.

The toolkit is particularly suited for youth workers, trainers, and educators looking for participatory and experiential methods to address sustainability in youth exchanges, training courses, local workshops, or educational programmes.

Most of the activities were designed and facilitated by young people themselves (youth-led approach), making them accessible and replicable without the need for specialised expertise in environmental science.

Developed by Brisa Intercultural Italia APS in collaboration with partner organisations from Spain, Germany, Bulgaria, Romania, and Portugal.