Climate change, economic inequality and social divisions urgently require innovative responses at multiple levels. The Paris Agreement, UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and Europe 2020 Strategy demonstrate substantial will at national and international levels to tackle these challenges, although actual implementation can be difficult and slow. At the local level though, there is a vibrant movement of community-led initiatives on climate change and sustainability. These Community-Led Initiatives (CLIs) are transformative social innovations that involve new ways of being, organising, negotiating and acting. There are thousands of such initiatives across Europe, from ecovillages to community energy cooperatives, social enterprises to zero-waste initiatives. Several recent transnational research projects have highlighted that the prospects for rapid transitions to sustainability are highest where municipal authorities collaborate with community-led initiatives. A 2018 paper from the European Economic and Social Committee on ‘Boosting climate actions by non-State actors’ reflects this growing recognition also at EU and global levels, and in February 2018, the Council of the EU for the first time acknowledged the critical role of local communities in addressing climate challenges. It is to fully leverage this potential, that the Ecovillage Transition in Action project and its outputs were designed. In our networks we see examples of engaged rural communities working for positive change who feel unsupported by local government. We also see many municipalities with positive goals and a determination to act, who are struggling to build genuinely collaborative relationships with local citizens and initiatives. We therefore aim to provide open and innovative education and materials designed to support both educators and adult learners develop key competences in cross-sectoral partnership building, community building, participatory design and collaboration between local authorities, communities and citizens in primarily rural areas. We wish to: - Grow the capacity of educators, local initiatives, local authorities, citizens and and community organisers to facilitate this crucial but complicated collaboration, and to teach those skills and capacities to others. - Provide accessible and transferable educational tools, trainings, curricula, and methods for bringing together CLIs and local government actors, and increase the depth and quality of collaboration between them. - Create and prototype a set of replicable trainings that support our target groups to acquire key competencies and skills for what we call Ecovillage Transition - a process where municipal authorities and local citizens work together to develop alternative pathways to local development, based on a holistic framework of social, cultural, economic and ecological regeneration. Through an inventory of good practice, successful examples and challenges in collaboration between local governments and community-led initiatives in rural locations, we will create an Ecovillage Transition Toolkit integrating practical experience and research – designed to foster partnership, engagement and participatory, holistic local development.A central element of the project is the development of new curricula for Ecovillage Transition, as well as a Training of Trainers module – both providing innovative materials and pedagogies for community-led initiatives, local authorities, educators and active citizens to work together for positive impactFinally, our Ecovillage Transition Tracker will combine elements of impact assessment, design thinking and participatory monitoring and evaluation. It aims to provide local initiatives and authorities with an innovative and practical framework and collaborative methodology for tracking the ongoing implementation of multi-stakeholder projects in ways that ensure dynamic steering, ongoing learning, and goals that matter to local communities. The EU-funded TESS research project noted that if 5 % of EU citizens engaged in community-led climate mitigation initiatives, 85% of EU-28 countries would achieve their 2020 emissions targets. TESS also highlighted the awareness raising, social cohesion, creation of local livelihoods and wealth retention, and the feeling of empowerment that citizens experience by working together to bring about change - and that 63% of the surveyed CLIs have been replicated elsewhere. Inspired, we aim to contribute to- rapidly scaling and spreading the type of innovative, sustainable and inclusive local solutions and impact already implemented by ecovillages and other community-led initiatives. - increased capacity for partnership-building and collaboration between CLIs and municipalities across Europe.- the development of innovative education for sustainable local development, capable of increasing collective capacity to take direct action to achieve the UN SDGs and climate agreements