Briefly, we wanted to achieve more students, more active and healthy, more often. We decided to start to build capacity for teachers to become active and to be prepared to motivate, mentor, and help students to adopt a healthy lifestyle. We wanted that participants gain awareness and understanding about the importance of a healthy lifestyle by participating in conferences and presentations on the theme, and practice physical activities and healthy eating habits, by participating in the challenges of the project or by setting their own goals. At the end of the project, we wanted for the participants to reach the WHO recommendations regarding physical activity and healthy eating habits. Also, we wanted that participants to experiment with an approach for personal development: set a goal, made a plan, and achieved the goal; to acquire knowledge for critical thinking and media literacy for the identification of fake news regarding healthy eating and safe physical training. We wanted to involve the students in community life; regardless the community is the school or the whole city, by organizing public events and building the safe routes, usable for all members of the community.
We started with the wish to change the mentality ”Food is tasty, time is short and exercise is hard” that exists in more students and adults all over the world. The needs we wanted to address were: low levels of physical activity for students and teachers, the lack of places where to be active, lack of time to do physical activities, few or no knowledge about healthy eating principles. Another issues we wanted to solve with this project were the low levels of active participation of students in school activities, and also no preoccupation and time of teachers to motivate, mentor and help students to learn by reflection, to have agency, to be capable of acting by themselves to make plans, carry out actions, make an informed decision based on their knowledge, and be flexible in changing times. The third need identified in all schools, from all six countries involved in the project, was the low level of active participation in the life of communities. We wanted to help students discover the ways in which they can take action and improve the community, respecting principles of sustainable development, through service learning campaigns.