Relate! Finding Stories to Embrace our Planet's Limits

The overall objective of the project is to contribute to overcoming the strong barriers and post-factual trends which stand in the way of a rapid social-ecological transformation needed to tackle the present fundamental challenges the EU and the world faces with regard to the climate and environmental crisis. It will do so by building capacities for intercultural, communications, and transformative literacy. To do so, it seeks for the creation of new narratives and will create serial stories, and ultimately a web series. For this, the project’s specific objectives are (1) to develop and produce a transformative series on social-ecological transformation with two seasons and several episodes, to (2) embed this Relate! Series in a highly dynamic and interactive transmedia learning platform which will be designed be linked to a variety of social media channels. (3) It will develop and implement a methodological framework to capacitate youth workers and young promoters through organic blended learning focusing on serial and transmedia storytelling. The project thus aims (4) at becoming a catalyst for the claims of the youths’ global and local responsibility and local action and goes far beyond traditional methods and shall function as professional support for the present EU and global movements of young people. The youth workers and young participants from Germany, Greece, Spain, Ecuador, Mexico and Chile will reflect and communicate the knowledge and complexity of these issues on a global scale, always connecting them to their local surroundings in order to give practical examples to their claims and to available scientific knowledge. They will also equip themselves to still increase pressure for national and European policy making and strategy building to show opportunities to take up citizenship towards participatory, inclusive and rapid action. On the present European climate agenda, there is a strong trend of storytelling and the quest for new narratives that guide our actions. However, this takes place on theoretical level, with no practical application yet on how to actually produce stories that build narratives and foster paradigm shifts which may go hand in hand with political change as well. The project will seek for practical application of these concepts which are these days lectured in conferences and discussed in scientific circles but show a lack of practical exploration, even though the generation of the Fridays for Future movement can certainly contribute with lots of strength to this matter when given the right tools, methods and opportunities. One could say, it is an ideal window of opportunity to capacitate on the considerable agenda shift in 2019 and to support the young change agents . Furthermore they have a feeling for rapid communications of daily life stories and are sufficiently flexible to intuitively create episodes of change. This will be the entry point of creating the Relate! Series.