As for the main achievement of the ‘Grow Green!’ project, we aimed at supporting underserved local communities to become more environment-friendly by offering comprehensive educational programmes for the members of the community and by sustaining the development of educational organisations working with them. We addressed the main ‘influencers’ of the communities, namely parents and educators in order to better achieve the goals of our project. We increased the competences of min. 50 non-formal educators who deal with environmental issues within under-served communities on how to organise and carry out parental environment education in order to make an impact on the younger generations, too. We also raised awareness and developed knowledge, skills and attitudes (KSA) of min. 90 parents of young children in order to ‘grow greener’ and become more of an environmentally-friendly future generation. Parents are key elements in raising more environmentally-friendly future generations, therefore the project emphasised on improving the accessibility and increasing the take-up of environmental education of this target group.
The idea of the project gained shape based on the research carried out about the increasing pan-European interest in environmental and sustainable development education and the recognition of the urgent need to implement sustainable development strategies due to the negative effects of human behaviour on the environment. We also studied the ‘European Green Deal Communication’ (2019) extensively which made and appeal to all institutions to engage with pupils, parents, and the wider community with the view of raising awareness to the actions needed in the environmental and climate change fields. The main needs that the ‘Grow Green!’ project addressed was the lack of support underserved local communities received in becoing more environmentally-friendly. They did not benefit of dedicated educational programmes and very few organisations received the necessary support to work with them. We carried out extensive studies in he field and discovered that underserved communities lack information, knowledge and know-how with regards to environmental issues and the importance of caring for the environment.