Our objectives were: 1. Strengthen our ability to cooperate at the European level through competence and knowledge sharing and joint experiential learning opportunities between the participating organisations. 2. Reach out to stakeholders interested in using climbing as a tool for inclusion and personal development and create the bases of a community of professionals in local communities in Spain and Germany. 3. Gather sources and resources on using climbing for inclusion and personal development in the European Youth Work field. 4. Create opportunities to share best practices from past experiences, cross feed ideas and create new pilots. 5. Create opportunities for stakeholders to test pilot ideas for future programs and receive feedback from peers. 6. Test out ideas and bring back experiences to peer stakeholders and connect stakeholders with youth work at the European level. 7. Create a documentation with recommendations, best practices for inclusion and skills development projects in climbing.
Climbing and outdoors have enormous potential for social-, emotional-, and behavioural- skills development, used as part of a therapy or working on group cohesion and inclusion. Indeed, in a number of recent scientific articles, the potential for climbing therapy is being recognised at the academic level. At the same time there are only a few specific programs able to tap into this potential and even fewer people with diverse backgrounds practising climbing in Europe. As an accredited organisation in Key Action 1, a fundamental need of Lernlabor was to broaden and consolidate its network of European partners and experts. Another was to develop our competences in offering programmes for young people who may be experience emotional difficulties or have experienced trauma (as a result of war, lockdown, climate breakdown - in a word. the multiple crises of our age). We assess that both these needs have been fully addressed by climb4good, not only through cooperation and peer learning with Experientia and increased engagement with our local target groups but also through the emergence of a wider conglomeration of international partners that arose from this project.