CONTEXT & BACKGROUNDThe project has been designed within a context that includes:• The widely agreed general need for massive levels of transformative change to achieve a sustainable low carbon future, and the more specific wide interest in and need for community-based climate action.• The development and sharing of innovation and good practice in learning about and demonstrating sustainable, low carbon living• The importance of transformative learning to create climate-positive behaviour change, for individuals and communities• The emergence of blended learning methods and systems, which can enable massive affordable accessibility and linking this to experiential learning for deep engagement, and inner and outer transformationOBJECTIVESSpecific project objectives are:1. To develop a system to train, support and enable Community Climate Coaches (CCC) across Europe, and to work toward ensuring this role is deeply embedded in the climate response and sustainability movements2. To capture, formalise and disseminate the experience and innovation of the partners and wider stakeholders through intellectual outputs and a structured dissemination programme3. To support the development and mapping of new and existing community climate initiatives and education systems in Europe4. To expand and strengthen learning and collaboration with partners in and beyond our movement5. To develop a CCC support system that enables a better understanding of the positive impacts and benefits arising from climate action education, for learning participants, local communities and the climateAchieving these objectives aims to bring about massive personal and community-led change over time, in response to the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Climate Agreement and related goals.PARTICIPANTS16 people will engage in core CCC project meetings, with 200 in-person attendees of multiplier events, and a target of 200+ on-line participants. 42 people will be engaged in in-person CCC training, with at least as many participating in online training. Dissemination activities across the partnership’s extensive networks will benefit many thousands of people, by giving them access to and use of the CCC project outputs. The CCC project participants are composed of a mix of people from larger networks of community-led initiatives and smaller adult education providers. They have complementary domains of expertise (including community resilience, social innovation, collaborative and asynchronous working, online learning) and most have long-term collaborative engagement with each other through ECOLISE.ACTIVITIESThe project activities will produce 5 inter-related Intellectual Outputs, linked Training and Multiplier events that are designed to generate deep, long-lasting benefits for the partners and particularly for the wider partnerships, network and collaborations these partners are engaged with. The project activities include online and Transnational Project meetings through which partners will progress the tasks to deliver the project outputs, project evaluation, and extensive dissemination to ensure wide and ongoing take-up of the project’s outputs.METHODOLOGY: COMMUNITY FACILITATION AND BLENDED LEARNINGThe project will train, build, map and gather data on climate action through a Community of Practice for continuous peer support that will sustain and extend collective learning, and nurture sharing of innovations amongst Community Climate Coaches. Blended learning methods will optimise the advantages of in-person and online learning to achieve Transformative Learning for the Coaches and their communities, with specialised knowledge, good practice and innovations shared online. The participants will engage with an online peer group as they progress their local-to-regional initiatives as the pioneers and facilitators of change, with peers providing confirmation and support, which maintains behaviour change. Participating in face-to-face training enhances the online learning by increasing the identification with the group and embodying individual and social learning experiences more deeply.RESULTS, IMPACT & LONG-TERM BENEFITSThe project results will enable a growing network of Community Climate Coaches to deliver highly accessible and affordable transformative learning and action for individuals and communities at scale. It will deliver the new role of Community Climate Coach, that pilots and develops methodologies for maximising effective community engagement with a set of tools and good practice that deliver significant carbon reductions. The impact will be that Europe's communities will be set up to have access to high quality transformative learning and community facilitation that will help bringing about significant shifts to sustainable low carbon lifestyles and communities.

CONTEXT & BACKGROUNDThe project has been designed with the following perspectives in mind:•The widely agreed need for massive levels of transformative change to achieve a sustainable low carbon future •The development of good practice in transformative learning•The relevance of transformative learning to behaviour change in this context, for individuals and communities•The emergence of blended learning methods and systems, which can combine the best aspects of digital learning (e.g. massive affordable accessibility) and experiential learning (deep engagement, inward and outward transformation) OBJECTIVESOur specific objectives are to:1) Provide a context for adult educators to improve their competences in delivering blended transformative learning for civic engagement in community-led initiatives.2) Increase reach and improve access, quality, attractiveness and coordination of educational delivery of transformative adult education initiatives across Europe that are supporting the social-ecological transition.3) Identify, pool, encourage and spread related social and educational innovations. 4) exploit results of other related EU projects.Achieving these objectives aims to bring about massive personal and community-led change over time by supporting people to engage actively in the socio-ecological transition in response to the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Climate Agreement and related goals. PARTICIPANTS15 people will engage in core BLAST project meetings, with 250 in-person attendees of multiplier events, and at least as many predicted on-line participants, the target being many more. Through dissemination activities across the partnership’s extensive networks, the objective is that the beneficiaries of the BLAST project outputs beyond the life of the project will be many thousands. The participants in the BLAST project is composed of a mix of people representing bigger networks of community-led initiatives and smaller adult education providers.They have complementary domains of expertise (such as regenerative design, community resilience, cosmopolitan communication, or social innovation) and have prior long-term collaborative engagement with each other (e.g. through ECOLISE), and more recent new linkages.ACTIVITIES The projects activities are to produce a set of 4 inter-related Intellectual Outputs, linked to a set of Training and Multiplier events that are designed to generate deep and long lasting benefits for the Community of Practice and the wider partnerships, network and collaborations that ReLeaP partners are engaged with. The project activities also include online and Transnational Project meetings through which partners will progress the tasks to deliver the project outputs, project evaluation, and extensive dissemination to ensure wide and ongoing take-up of the project’s outputs.METHODOLOGY: BLENDED LEARNING AND COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICEBlended learning can overcome the disadvantages of face-to-face and online learning for achieving Transformative Learning. This is coupled with the Community of Practice approach (Etienne Wenger) for sustaining and extending collective learning and providing a nurturing space for innovations.• Specialised knowledge and related conversations can be accessed online, leaving precious face-to-face time for whole person experiential and social learning.• The participants are engaged with online peer group when they work on their projects at home. As the pioneers of change who may face resistance in their social environment, this is very helpful, providing confirmation and support, which maintains behaviour change.• Participating occasionally in a face-to-face module enhances an online course by increasing the identification with the group and enabling embodied experiences.RESULTS, IMPACT & LONG-TERM BENEFITSThe project will produce a set of results which enable adult educators to deliver transformative learning affordably at scale, in highly accessible ways. It will deliver training to educators that pilots and develops a methodology for maximising the effectiveness of educators and learners to engage with, use and benefit from the platform and system that the project delivers. The impact will be that Europe's communities will be set up to have access to high quality transformative learning that will help bringing about significant shifts to sustainable low carbon lifestyles and communities.POTENTIAL LONGER TERM BENEFITSThe potential longer term benefits include massive shifts to low carbon living, health creating and circular resource efficient lifestyles, resilient low carbon communities, with healthy local and regional economies and ecosystems that deliver healthy food and clean energy to the communities they serve in Europe, and beyond.

The GROW Observatory (GROW) will create a sustainable citizen platform and community to generate, share and utilise information on land, soil and water resource at a resolution hitherto not previously considered. The vision is to underpin smart and sustainable custodianship of land and soil, whilst meeting the demands of food production, and to answer a long-standing challenge for space science, namely the validation of soil moisture detection from satellites. GROW is highly innovative project leveraging and combining low cost consumer sensing technology, a simple soil test and a large user base of growers and plant enthusiasts to contribute individual soil and land data. It is designed to engage primarily individual growers and small-scale farmers across Europe, and to enable them to develop new wisdom and innovative practices through the collective power of shared and open data and knowledge. Citizens contributing data will gain access to the first single-source comprehensive crop and watering advice service for individual and small-scale growers incorporating scientific and crowdsourced information. Moreover, they will develop ‘campaigns’ (coordinated sampling operations) around local needs and issues, to underpin smarter decision-making and implementation of policy objectives. GROW will actively identify and enable new and credible social and business innovation processes, creating potential new services, applications and markets. The outcome will be a central hub of open knowledge and data created and maintained by growers that will be of value to the citizens themselves as well as specialist communities in science, policy and industry. The GROW partnership will connect and scale to globally dispersed communities linked through digital and social platforms, and a wide range of additional citizen associations and NGOs in sustainable agriculture, gardening, food democracy and land management.

In line with the new CAP post2020, the F2F Strategy and the Green Deal, the EU4Advice Project will develop enabling methodologies and tools to connect short food supply chains (SFSCs) advisors in a common network with the aim of fostering the upscaling of consumer-producer chains across Europe. SFSCs are a mean for producers to increase their bargaining power and to improve their position within the value chain and for consumers to increase trust, transparency, quality and safety of their food. Political and socio-economic barriers and gaps need to be addressed in order to enhance the scope of consumer-producer chains across Europe and EU4Advice will provide the necessary tools to the relevant stakeholders to overcome them. One key challenge to achieve this goal is to improve national AKIS by implementing new governance models that facilitates the integration of SFSCs advisory services Through a multi-actor approach involving advisors, policy makers, researchers, farmers and consumers, and by implementing a living lab methodology, EU4Advice will create the foundations for the establishment of a network of SFSC-advisors across Europe that will be appropriately structured and connected to a diversity of stakeholders within the national AKIS. The development of networking tools, contents for SFSCs advisors, a tailored dissemination, communication and exploitation strategy, and impact assessment plans will create the appropriate ecosystem for the effective transfer of knowledge among stakeholders in the 27 EU members. Based on previous key related multi-actor projects, EU4Advice will apply the “GAIN transition model” to guide the successful implementation of the multi-actor network through different administrative levels: local, regional, national and European. EU4Advice will establish appropriate channels for collaboration and knowledge exchange among a selected group of multi-actor projects, thematic networks and focus groups at EU level, to ensure a long term impact

DESIRA will develop the concept of Socio-Cyber-Physical Systems to advance understanding of the impact of digitisation in rural areas, linking analysis directly to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. Operationalising the Responsible Research and Innovation approach, DESIRA will enrol agriculture, forestry and rural stakeholders in co-developing scenarios and policies in Living Labs established in 20 European Regions, and a Rural Digitization Forum gathering 250 stakeholders from all Europe. A Virtual Research Environment tailored to the purposes of the project will connect all participants and allow to increase substantially the interaction within the network. DESIRA will provide a Taxonomy and Inventory of Digital Game changers which will be implemented into an online Visualization Tool, a Set of Socio-Economic Impact Indicators aligned to the Sustainability Development Goals implemented into an online Socio-Economic Impact Tool, a Pan-European Assessment of digitization in European rural regions, a Needs, Expectations and Impact appraisal report, a Comparative Scenario Report based on scenario development activities of Living Labs and the Rural Digitization Forum, a Policy analysis and Roadmap, an Ethical Code to be adopted by researchers and innovators and recommended by policy bodies, five Use Cases that will report a further analysis – co-created by Living Labs with the support of ICT specialists - of the most promising solutions identified by Living Labs, Showcase Technologies - including a Virtual Farm Platform - that will create a selection of proof of concepts suggested by Use Cases. A detailed, multi-media dissemination, engagement and communication strategy will accompany the project from the beginning, looking at research as a multifunctional (research, engagement and communication) process and at the same time involving communication specialists in the development of adequate messages and in the choice of the most effective media.