KekoVerkko ("Trainers' network of sustainable livestyle") -project applicant and sending organisation GEN-Finland (Global Ecovillage Network Finland; official name in Finnish: Suomen kestävän elämäntavan yheisöt ry SKEY) is an association that promotes sustainable lifestyle in Finland in a variety of ways and serves as a networking platform for Finnish ecovillages. The assocation is a non-profit, volunteer-based non-governmental organisation. GEN-Finland offers, supports and co-ordinates trainings related to sustainable lifestyle to ecovillages, other NGO’s and to other people interested. The trainings are organised in different parts of Finland in ecovillages and in co-operation with other associations and trainers in their localities. The association participates actively to the activities of ecovillage networks in the Baltic area and Europe. The purpose of the project is to strengthen the trainer-network of GEN-Finland according to the association’s training strategy. This supports GEN-Finland to increase and diversify the number and quality of trainings. The main goal is to get the trainers’ network more trainers who have done a so-called EDE-training (Ecovillage Design Education). The purpose of EDE is to complement and support the programme of the UN on the decade of education of sustainable development 2005-2014 and participate into creating new training models. The trainings concentrate on four aspects of sustainability, ecological, social, economical and cultural. The training material is already translated into Finnish. The international trainings improve the language skills of the trainers and offer training capacities and skills that are not yet available in Finland. They also improve GEN-Finland’s capability to act as a trainer in international courses in the Baltic area and even wider. The project trains people who are active in the association to serve as trainers in the trainers’ network of sustainable livestyle. The persons trained have different backgrounds, usually academic though, and they are interested in adult education or they even have experience on it. The aim is to choose the persons so that they are equally distributed geographically and from a gender-perspective as well. The people to be trained are sent to the training centres (so called “living and learning” -centres) of European most traditional, central and most experienced ecovillages. The project offers the possibility for three adult educators to participate the international EDE-course, four trainers to improve their "basic studies" on an international educational conference of the field, five educators to take part in several advanced courses on group facilitation and ecological and social sustainability, and for two experienced trainers to perform a job shadowing period in international living and learning centres. The administration of the project is taken care of by the co-ordinator of the project working in the association. Her work is supported by the advisory committee of the project and the board of the association. The trainings offered by the project are advertised in the association’s mailing list and it’s new webpages (under work at the moment).The advisory committee chooses the participants that are sent to trainings abroad on the basis of applications. The participants commit themselves to report on the outcomes of the trainings and to make use of them actively in association’s training network. The immediate output of the project is that the association gets five new trainers to it’s network, seven advanced trainers get complementary training and two experienced trainers get a chance for a period of “job shadowing”. With these resources the association shall organise in the next years around four short trainings of sustainable livestyle on a national level. At the same time the association prepares a four week’s EDE-training (in Finnish) for a year 2017. There is even a plan to create a joint EDE-course for the Baltic Sea region, taking place in several countries. The trainers of the training network are encouraged to organise short trainings in their home municipalities. The trainers get through this project a peer support network and a chance to an active information sharing. Through trainings organized, more and more people in Finland have a chance to get familiar with the sustainable lifestyle applying participatory training methods. In the long run, this forms a basis of increasing the number of ecovillages in Finland and also supporting our society to become more sustainable in general.