Growing public engagement has led us to recognize the enormous potential of our educational program. We wanted to support a trend towards environmental active citizenship by providing innovative education. Our objectives were to: 1. Improve the quality and inclusivity of our educational provision with innovative pedagogical approaches to anti-discrimination and intersectionality education to reach a wider range of learners (particularly marginalised/disadvantaged learners) 2.Update and improve our curriculum with holistic tools and methodologies which address organisational and individual resilience. 3. Increase our competence to support our target learners with skills and knowledge to take social entrepreneurial initiative to develop community led projects seeking to address key social issues. 4. Establish strong relationships with other adult educators across Europe to share best practice and improve our skill and familiarity with new digital education methods.
Since 1991, ASEED has used adult education to promote pro-environmental behaviour and active citizenship. In recent years our work has intensified due to growing civil society responses to climate change, corresponding with growing numbers of participants attending our localised learning groups. With the Netherlands not on track to reach the Climate Act recommendations to reduce its greenhouse emissions by 65% by 2030, we wanted to urgently scale up the reach and quality of our education provision in these key areas of improvement: i) Increased accessibility for more minority/disadvantaged groups in our learning environments ii) Increased capacity to offer employment opportunities and build staff resilience, engagement and retention at ASEED, who like many not-for-profits, struggle to retain educators iii) Increasing our learner’s strategic understanding of how initiatives across the social and environmental context can work smarter together to effect long term change.