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Food Actions!-participatory learning and training ..
Food Actions!-participatory learning and training package for food-wise household
Start date: Sep 1, 2015,
End date: Aug 31, 2017
PROJECT
FINISHED
'Food is essential to life. It also forms an important part of our cultural identity, and plays an important role in the economy.' says on a report from European Commission. 'Food systems contribute 19%–29% of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions' according to Annual Review of Environment and Resources. Therefore, addressing food challenges will contribute to some central topics of EU, especially Horizon2020: Climate and environment, cultural integration and a more dynamic and vigorous economy.
So the question is where to start? Our answer is each individual adult learner who want to learn how they can take actions to combate food problems. Our reasons are based on both theories and pratices. From a theory aspect, social changes and innovation follow a social diffusion model which starts with early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. If we can follow this pattern and have individual adult learner to act, all actions will spread through the whole society. From a practice aspect, this project is based on a pilot food program where we engaged more stakeholders in a community, namely, food producers, food processors, food distributors, industrial kitchens, individuals and local authorities. This pilot project shows that each individual person is more effective to take actions and a certain amount of active individuals are able to influence the other actors on a community level.
So the primary target group of this project is all adult learners in EU who want to learn what they can do to address food challenges. Therefore, the first intellectual ouput will be a self-learnig workbook for individual adult learners. This workbook will be different from other similar workbooks because we will use an innovative pedagogical method to design the workbook. The method is innovative because it aims to produce long-term impact and life-long learning experiences through action and measurement. This method is based on our decades of work with education for sustainable development, especially informal/normal adult education. It looks at a circular learning experience, as opposed to linear learning. Our research together with research institutes, such as Leiden Univeristy and Swedish Centre for Education for Sustainable Development, shows that 'care-finding information-taking actions-seeing results-caring more-finding more information' model will empower individuals to take real actions.
But this book will not come alone. We will produce two complementing intellectual outputs: training modules for coaches and one online library.
The reason for training modules for coaches is that we encourage all adult learners to organize a study circle. Our practice proves that a study circle for adult education is more effective and can produce replicable impact (through people inviting new people) and such a study circle needs an empowering coach to facilitate the whole process. The reason for one online library is that any organizations that want to start a similar project can find all their needed information on this platform, including most updated research, project management, marketing material with videos, flyers, etc.
So this is a complete package to achieve our goal that all adult learners in EU can start a life-long learning experience on food-related issues and have appropriate facilitation. In order to realize this package, we formed a strategic partnership:1) four out of five participated in the international multi-stakeholder food-wise community pilot project and have experience in food-related issues; 2) they all have experience in training and coaching with a focus in different areas, namely, municipalities (GAP Spain), business(agado) and community(TVE and InEuropa); 3) all are experienced in international and transnational projects, with GAP International and InEuropa exceptional in project managementment and project reporting; 4) all have good local and international connections through partnership and network; 4) all partners are part of GAP International network and have cooperated before.
Main activities based on its expertise: 1) three transnational meetings: October-2015, Italy for kick-off meetings and coordination of different workplans and plan for the draft of the workbook; September-2016, Germany for finalization of workbook after testing phase and the launch of the training modules for coaches; February-2017, Sweden for finalization of the project and project evaluation; 2) three organizations lead three intellectual outputs: workbook for adult learners (Hungary), training modules for coaches (GAP International) and online library (GAP Spain); 3) GAP International and InEuropa will be in charge of overall project management including project coordination, quality control and monitoring, project evaluation and reporting; 4) GAP International will also be in charge of dissemination with the social media part lead by TVE