By 2030 60% of the world’s population or 4.9 billion people are expected to live in urban areas. It is argued that urbanism is fundamentally changing the condition of humanity and our relationship to the earth.  The environmental impact of urban areas is putting a huge strain on our Earth’s resources and creating additional issues for the inhabitants of these areas such as loss of biodiversity and urban heat island effect. At this time young people across the globe are creating urban spaces where creativity, environmental and social action join together, inspiring local inhabitants, encouraging municipalities and empowering businesses to adapt greener practices.

Picture by: Tau Pibernat – http://trial-error.org

This international meeting will gather 35 young participants and several experts to discuss topics tackling green urban living, finding ways how to bring city kids into urban outdoors, facilitating change from environmentally unfriendly behaviors into green and healthy ones. The meeting will be filled with webinars, interactive lectures, open-sharing spaces, so that you can share your skills, gain new knowledge and get inspired by your peers and invited experts.

We will give you a possibility to discover more on urban gardening, community facilitation, transition movements- all topics connected to active youth involvement in green community building in cities.

 

Role of the partners of the project:

– Selecting and preparing participants (between 1 and 3 per organization) to attend the meeting and represent sending organization, actively contribute to the programme and disseminate the results of the project upon their return

– Actively promoting the project in owned communication channels and within own organization

 

Costs of being partner of the project:

– The participants or their sending organizations are expected to contribute 30 per cent to their travel cost.- Project costs are partially covered by the grant of the Youth in Action programme (4.3). All programme, educational materials, accommodation and food related costs are covered. 70 per cent of travel costs to the meeting are covered.

Eligible partners: NGOs and associations from 27 Member States of the European Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland, Turkey and Croatia.

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The meeting will be kindly hosted by the local group of Italian Naturefriends in Volterra – located in the heart of Tuscany. This house owned by the association brings the community of Italian Naturefriends together since 1978 and is a centre of various joint activities, such as star watching and photographic courses.

The venue boasts and incredible history of community reconstruction and its own astronomic observatory – and we are not even mentioning the stunning views on the Tuscan landscape and nature.

 

To become a partner of this project

 – Fill in the preliminary agreement of a partner form –https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/43652459/Urban%20Outdoors%202013_preliminary_agreement.docx – and send the scanned version of it to IYNF office by e-mail to ewa@iynf.org (no need to send it by post)

 – Fill in the partner identification form –https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/43652459/Urban%20Outdoors%20Partner%20Identification%20Form.doc and send it back as a Word document by e-mail to ewa@iynf.org

Make sure that you fill-in all the fields with up-to-date and appropriate information, especially your role in the project and the details of EU subventions you have received.

The deadline for sending the documents is May 26th 2013.

Learn more about International Young Naturefriends: http://www2.iynf.org/about-us/what-iynf

If you have any questions or queries, please write to Ewa, ewa@iynf.org