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Youth and Communities for Environmental Justice

Funder: European CommissionProject code: 2018-2-BE05-KA205-002488
Funded under: ERASMUS+ | Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices | Strategic Partnerships for youth Funder Contribution: 102,167 EUR
Open Access mandate
Publications: NoResearch data: No

Youth and Communities for Environmental Justice

Description

Environmental and social justice movements are growing globally and are an intrinsic part of influencing decision making spaces internationally and nationally. Nevertheless, accessibility to be an active and politically aware young citizen is often defined by one’s education, geographical placement, class, gender, religious beliefs or privilege in general. This is not an exception in climate action movement. To change this, we used popular education and youth empowerment tools to advance youth work for better inclusion of marginalised community members into campaigns, activities and strategic work planning of environmental youth organisations, as well as wider civil society movements in Europe and ensure that we involve voices of those who are least heard in decision and policy making spaces. Through an initial mapping exercise, the project has identified the substantial gap between well established youth climate justice groups and front line communities in Europe which are directly impacted by environmental injustice. The project Youth and Communities for Environmental Justice (YCEJ) brought together 10 youth climate justice organisations across Europe (based in Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, North Macedonia, Norway, Scotland and Spain) and created the link between them and the local frontline communities affected by environmental injustices. Three key thematic issues, affecting key target groups in European countries were identified: 1) Communities affected by development of large scale projects and large-scale land deals ‘land-grabbing’ (including mining and big energy projects); 2) Rural communities whose livelihoods are being threatened by changing climate patterns locally; 3) Communities impacted by the energy transition, such as workers and communities with cultural and economic links to the fossil fuel industry. Partner organisations have been strategically clustered to work on the issues which are particularly relevant in their respective national and local contexts. In the first part of the project, nearly 100 youth activists and organisers of the these youth organisations - and several other organisations in certain training events - were trained in transnational training events (including on the three above-mentioned topics) on community organising and anti-oppressive organising, with a strong intersectionality prespective. After having extensively built their capacity and gained transferable skills for inclusive organising, running campaigns, working with groups and advocating their causes, youths systematically involved people of under-represented frontline communities into their campaigns for environmental justice, with the aim of amplifying their voices in the national decision and policy making frameworks as well as raising awareness on the issues, which are often unnoticed by the general population. Partners of the project organised 35 activities at the local or national levels in which they involved over 740 people directly affected by environmental injustice on the local level, and over 1,200 people in total. These activities included the organisation of trainings, workshops, public events and debates, movie screenings and photography exhibitions, street actions and protests as well as booklet and toolkit production. This concretely empowered people from over 15 local frontline communities and allowed them to make their voices better heard and to male their struggles more visible and better known. Together, frontline communities and youth activists reached over 170,000 people in public engagement activities, both physically and online. At the European and international levels, a series of 11 anti-oppressive and intersectionality tools for empowerment were produced and widely disseminated to the network of Young Friends of the Earth Europe, to the community of youth activists in Europe and even beyond. Additionally, five cases studies were also published and disseminated. In total, it is estimated that these educational and communication tools and case studies reached over 25,000 participants.The project created long-lasting relations between the participant groups, the individual participants and local communities impacted by environmental injustices. These links are now strong enough for future cooperation actions. The network of Young Friends of the Earth Europe will continue working with frontline and under-represented communities to fight against local and global environmental injustices, both in current and in future projects.

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