Let's get active: participatory community challenges ahead

Dear community members,

we have recently gotten the feedback that you are impatiently waiting for an update on what is coming up in terms of concrete participatory community challenges.

After we co-designed the community and launched this platform at the end of 2021, we see 2022 as the community's build-up phase: including all structures and processes making the community a sustainable one - you find all actions and events related to this in our main community workshops, meetings and gathering in 2022 calendar.

But hold on, the core of it all is concrete co-experimentation in challenges - and in light of 2023 launching the Education for Climate's operational phase, we have quite a few in mind:

• currently, we are looking for community contributions for the New European Bauhaus Festival - your community highlights, showcases, good practices that we can make heard and applied together
• you will soon see, too, another round of  our challenge THE SKY IN ME_ a climate action
• in March, we will launch a community challenge around how saving water could become a lifelong habit - this might be linked to another challenge on oceans, tbd
• there's another close collaboration coming up with the New European Bauhaus on its call for places of learning and their transformation - we are looking for community examples & concrete actions to take together! This will lead to a structured co-working process in dedicated sessions, leading up to the Education for Climate Day 
• in May, we have our first Education for Climate Policy/Practice Forum coming up - and we're more than eager to co-shape it to brigde science with education, to bridge policy with education - community challenge incoming!
• moreover, this policy/practice event is the perfect springboard for a challenge around the GreenComp you already showed a lot of interest in
• we also will be looking very soonish for community companions who would like to join and co-shape with us input for the (internal) Joint Research Centre's first Science Summit "Let's talk science" in June - we are proud of the community and its members and would like to bring it close(r) to the breadth and depth of scientific expertise we have in-house. 
• we also have the pleasure to announce that we have started a very exciting collaboration with our colleagues from DG Environment on the 3 Billion Trees initiative - we already now want to 'prepare a fertile soil for a planting trees challenge' in October: mobilizing pan-European actions/ content creation on (how to) planting, caring, funding & raising awareness around tree planting and making spaces greener. 
• our second Education for Climate Day on October 5th will be as interactive and community-driven as the last, so its co-design call and active challenge work will be out well before summer, too! We are looking forward to creating another community festival together that enriches the education for environmental sustainability landscape from as many angles as possible. 
• we see community energy emerging around "how to measure your contribution to the climate crisis?" and the consumer footprint calculator - this might well come up as challenge soonish, too, if there are more inputs around it!

As you can read, we have quite a busy schedule until at last October, but there's still room for more if there's appetite.

In general, we have also on our radar:

• a meta-challenge on collecting learning resources from all over the community knowledge; i.e. bringing together different knowledge repositories, material providers, information hosts in a brainstorming exercise of what is out there for you to concretely work with in education for environmental sustainability
• a community challenge around SELFIE

But we also have 'placeholders' there for you:

• we aspire to get active within the European Year of Youth - what could it be that we facilitate, what would the community like to highlight and take action on?
• a wildcard: what community challenge is absolutely missing from this list? What would you like to see the community taking steps on together, to address, experiment, etc.?

Now, what are your thoughts on this?

Where would you like to get active?

What would you suggest as challenge?

Looking forward to the community conversation!