Our main objective was to make post-growth and transformative education more accessible for non-formal educators across Europe by creating practical, ready-to-use educational methodologies. We aimed to develop Post-Growth Transformative Education Handbook featuring eight educational activities focused on post-growth. The handbook should be readily used in non-formal educational contexts. We wanted these materials to help educators go beyond simplified discussions about sustainability and enable young people to critically explore systemic issues and relationships between economic growth, climate change and inequality. Given that transformative post-growth education is still a relatively new and emerging field, we wanted to create opportunity for in-person exchange, mutual learning, and future collaboration through an in-depth week-long gathering for non-formal educators from different European countries. This gathering was meant to serve as the foundation for building a loose European network of post-growth educators, where they could share methodologies, plan future projects, and collectively strengthen the impact of post-growth education across Europe.
We applied for this project because we identified a growing gap between the rapidly developing field of post-growth research and the lack of accessible educational tools that would allow young people and educators to engage with these ideas in practice. Simultaneously, across Europe, young people increasingly experience climate anxiety, economic insecurity, and frustration with responses focused only on individual lifestyle changes rather than systemic causes. At the same time, educators often lack practical methodologies for facilitating critical discussions about systemic solutions to the problems of climate change, inequality and the possibilities of social transformation. Both partner organisations, NaZemi and Institute of Political Ecology (IPE) observed rising interest in post-growth education through their summer schools, workshops, and educational programmes. We applied for this project to deepen our expertise and experience in the topic of post-growth within non-formal education, become European pioneers in this field and also learn from one another.