The choice of climate action in combination with the tools of awareness-raising, arts, social entrepreneurship, and advocacy is defined by the current global environmental crisis and the call of young people to take urgent measures to mitigate the effects of climate change. Since 2019, the climate emergency is reflected not only in government initiatives but in global policies such as the European Green Deal, European Youth Strategy, Sustainable Development Goals. Despite these efforts, increased awareness, more green skills, and heightened collaboration are needed at multiple levels to reverse the damage to the ecosystem.

Community Challengers

Project Community Challengers – Towards sustainable & climate neutral communities through Arts & Entrepreneurship, aims to activate young people with fewer opportunities to become aware of the causes and effects of climate change and the need for action and mobilise their communities to become climate-smart, sustainable and united by combining arts with entrepreneurship and advocacy.

4 Key Dimensions:

1. Environment: support awareness raising of young people and youth workers about environmental challenges and develop a methodology to address them through arts and entrepreneurship (with a possibility for schools and non-formal learning institutions to use this model).

2. Entrepreneurship: develop competences of young people in entrepreneurship with a focus on sustainability, green skills and stakeholder collaboration (with a possibility for the schools and non-formal learning institutions to use this model).

3. Arts: use the arts as a means of delivering the message to the community to bring about change and as the empowerment tool for young people to get their voices heard and to become agents of change.

4. Advocacy: empower young people to become role models to enable behavioral change for the community and individual preferences and lifestyles; influence policies through multi-sector collaboration and involve youth ambassadors for climate action.

LACA Model

The Community Challengers project is based on the LACA learning model which is composed of 4 main steps and pillars. Those are directly linked to the Intellectual Outputs (IO) of the project:

L – Learn (IO1: Sustainability & Climate Action Handbook)
A – Analyse (IO2: The Community Mapping Toolkit)
C – Create (IO3: The Community Challengers Guide)
A – Advocate (IO4: The Advocacy Tutorials on Climate Action)