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Inter-generational Ecological and Economical Co-learning
Start date: Sep 3, 2015, End date: Sep 2, 2017 PROJECT  FINISHED 

ECOLE_IG implements informal local knowledge exchange structures in six European localities to facilitate inter-generational knowledge exchange and collaborative innovation with the aim to equip young people in underprivileged areas (rural remote, difficult urban) with the skills, confidence and support network to set up new entrepreneurial structures which are rooted in their local or regional traditions. Europe’s rural and peripheral communities have longstanding and often successful local and regional manufacturing and farming traditions. They often still have access to once-functioning infrastructures (eg. agricultural co-operatives, common land rights, communal bake houses etc), means and spaces of production (farms, workshops, tools, machinery, etc.) and related skills and knowledge, but lack long-term engagement, innovation skills and strategic developments by the younger generation. Additionally many of these communities have suffered from global economic pressures and a general exodus of a younger entrepreneurial and technically skilled generation to the European metropolitan centres of creative industries and IT. ECOLE_IG focuses on bringing these two groups together: the young who want and need to set up local sustainable and resilient futures, and the older generation who holds relevant and precious local knowledge, access to resources and skills. ECOLE_IG stands for Inter-generational Ecological and Economical Co-learning and sets up a new network practice-led learning infrastructure across six exemplary European communities (from the remote rural to the deprived suburban) in order to initiate and stimulate cross-generational and cross-disciplinary learning and subsequently practiced entrepreneurship in places where a more traditional and organic 'passing-on' of knowledge and resources has been interrupted. ECOLE_IG will publish and widely distribute a case-study based on-line and printed manual to explain and demonstrate its methodology and parameters for application. The manual aims to encourage other educational organisation, communities and researchers to consider and replicate such an approach for future sustainable local resilience building and socio-economic development. The ECOLE_IG project will take place in Leipzig and its rural hinterland (DE), at the University of Sheffield and the village of Ballykinlar (UK), in rural Friesland (NL), the Parisian suburb of Colombes (FR), remote mountain communities in the Valcea County (RO) and the Vallagarina disrict in Nothern Italy. Participants include local communities of young people and older generations with different professional and educational backgrounds, unemployed young adults, pedagogues and trainers with a broad knowledge horizon, local organisations and NGOs and invited experts from the field of design, local economies and community-led development. Participants in the two international action research dissemination events include teachers and pedagogues from a wide range of organisations, cultural institutions and outreach workers, and researchers from the realm of sustainability, socio-economical development and resilience building. The accompanying ECOLE_IG Manual will be promoted and distributed locally, nationally and internationally with the ambition to encourage other communities and education facilitators and providers to replicate this locality specific inter-relational training model.
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