The Green Horizons project aimed to empower educators with the skills and tools needed to integrate sustainability into creative sector education while fostering active student engagement in climate-related initiatives. Specifically, we managed to: 1) improve the evaluation skills of educators in sustainability within the Cultural and Creative Sectors (CCS), ensuring that teaching content was industry-relevant and embedded sustainable practices; 2) develop tailored Service-Based Learning (SBL) systematic approaches for both VET learners and secondary school students, enhancing the relevance, applicability, and cross-curricular integration of green topics in line with the CCS context; and 3) involve students in hands-on initiatives that generated tangible benefits for local communities, enriching their learning while fostering social responsibility. Achieving these objectives strengthened the alignment between education and industry needs, improved the employability of VET graduates, enriched secondary school curricula, and cultivated a new generation of sustainability-conscious, socially engaged young people.
We applied for the Green Horizons project to address a critical gap in integrating “green competencies,” as defined in GreenComp – The European sustainability competence framework (©European Union, 2022), into creative-focused study programs. Prior experience, showed that almost 73% of Luxembourg Creative Lab participants lacked essential green skills, limiting their capacity to set sustainable long-term learning goals and advance professionally. Similarly, in Bulgaria, despite the inclusion of sustainability topics in school curricula, their effective delivery depended heavily on teachers’ personal expertise and motivation, with 41% of “Creativity & Design” teachers lacking green skills and 79% unable to apply them in practice (EduTech attestation data). The project addressed the absence of structured mechanisms to evaluate and enhance sustainability initiatives in education, and the green skills gap among VET trainers and secondary school teachers. By equipping teachers with up-to-date resources, methodologies, and assessment tools, we aimed to empower them as key multipliers of environmental awareness, responsibility, and action, fostering a new generation ready to meet 21st-century sustainability challenges.