With this project we intended to give our community the opportunity to participate in structured courses in various parts of Europe. The topics and training contents had the specific objective of providing direct and more formal answers to the needs felt in our institution. Thus, we wanted our collaborators to develop skills in: adult education (fostering pedagogical skills and new, engaging and innovative ways of teaching and communicating with adults); language skills; social inclusion of disadvantaged communities; management and coordination of educational projects. However, mobility experiences bring many more opportunities for personal and institutional enrichment than knowledge alone. So indirectly we also wanted to work on another kind of valorization: cultivate the European vision in environmental education and the implementation of sustainability agendas, and encourage interculturality in our way of working. The ‘Training for Inclusion' project was certainly a big step towards working on the continuous improvement of our institution, but also on our European dimension directly through the work and experience abroad of our collaborators.
Associação BioLiving (BL) is an NGO, created in 2016, with the motto "Nature and Education for All". In the last 6 years, BL has been working with several municipalities in environmental actions and has boosted a large number of volunteering actions, civic trainings and projects, through nature. We have always used environmental education and nature as a "democratic" way to unify society and promote the inclusion of all. We focus our work mainly in central-northern Portugal, but we aim for a robust European dimension, which is fully reflected in our modes of action and principles. For example, since we manage habitats and advise municipalities on sustainability, we always align our recommendations and field actions with the latest European standards. With more and more educational projects, activities and other requests, the project "Training for Inclusion" was very important to empower our associative body, staff and employees with fundamental skills in adult education, but also to experience and learn about educational realities across Europe and take the good examples that were found in order to apply them in BioLiving.