With EduCity the partners wanted to experience the use of city neighborhoods as educational environments, to offer non-formal learning opportunities for fragile residents and to exploit them to promote social inclusion, participation and community engagement processes. By designing a handbook and a training scheme the partners provided methods and tools to recognise territorial resources as memories, stories, ideas and competences of local citizens and to transform them into educational opportunities (Specific Objective 1: to recognise, valorise and map place-based knowledge and competences owned by fragile adults). Moreover they tested these educational resources in a training for neighborhood facilitators, involving their and associated partners staff (Specific Objective 2: to train adult educators as neighborhood facilitators able to activate participatory processes of valorisation of the local resources with a target of fragile adults). During the realization of local practices the facilitators worked on enhancing bottom-up participatory processes of valorisation of local resources with fragile adults, defined as Open Educational Practices (Specific Objective 3: to exploit the use of place-based knowledge and competences).
Edu-City contributed to highlight and learn from undervalued resources of the city by creating on field participatory practices with adults living and working in deprived neighborhoods. As experienced by project partners, often fragile adults are the one more excluded from local opportunities of inclusion and participation. The project offered from one side the opportunity to train a new professional figure of neighborhood facilitators (selected among the partners and associated partners staff) and on the other to develop Open Educational Practices with the communities of five deprived urban contexts, offering them opportunities of inclusion, participation, learning and local resources valorisation. Moreover Edu-City recognised the educational value of territorial competences and local expertise of the different territories and used them to activate processes of participation and civic engagement but also empowerment of job and life perspectives of the fragile adults involved in project activities.