Ideal's in action

Via Brachy is a French non-profit organization established at Toulouse, Occitanie. Since 1998, we aim at empowering people, enhancing social and ecological projects run by citizens and fostering cultural dialogue between people and organizations from various backgrounds. We organize mobility projects and non-formal educational activities in order to encourage social inclusion and to help people find their way in society.

We believe that travelling opens people’s minds to new realities and encourages them to share ideas, knowledge and experiences. We promote eco-friendly living, social and collaborative economy and advocate for social change.

In practice:

• we organize learning mobility projects (youth exchanges, seminars, training courses) in South-West France (Occitania) and Europe as catalysts for personal transformation and social change. Since 2013, we propose one Heterotopia Tour a year;
• we supports our partners’ initiatives in Senegal (development of eco-friendly income-generating activities, using ecological equipment as low-energy cooking tools and dryers);
• we organize local trainings and public events in order to share what we learnt and to address social and ecological issues with people from various background.

More info: www.viabrachy.org

European Village is a Greek NGO established in Athens in 2006. We aim at spreading ideas and supporting actions regarding social and collaborative economy and sustainable development.

Our association empowers people through non-formal educational activities, sensitization events and vocational trainings.

Firstly involved in intercultural dialog and exchange of good practices in Europe through hosting and sending European volunteers (EVS) and participating in international meetings, we have extended our activities in the fields of social innovation, living together, non-violent communication and poverty alleviation, in order to meet the needs of people, still strongly impacted by the consequences of the 2008 global financial crisis, and by the current migrant crisis.

From 2010, we run a cooperative café in an emblematic and popular borough of Athens, in which we organize talks and debates dealing with social current issues and free Do-It-Yourself workshops addressed to all target groups.

Since 2015, we also have strengthened our action towards vulnerable people by setting up an itinerant and social food truck (Nomadiki Kouzina) providing food and warmth to disadvantaged people.

Since 2017, we are developing our activities in the field of non-formal education at both notional and european level. Thanks to the knowledge we acquire and to the opportunities that we offer to people, we aim at preventing the rising of social tensions due to the misunderstanding of the Stranger and of the Difference in an uncomfortable social and economic context.

More on: http://european-village.org/

FORME is a non-profit and non-governmental organisation based in Palermo, Italy, since 2014. Our team is composed by project managers, educators, social workers, journalists and other actors active in the social and educational fields who strongly believe in skills development as a trigger for positive social changes.

FORME aims at empowering individuals, communities and social networks through skills development and mediation between different sectors. We promote non-formal education as a complementary methodology to formal education and we develop educational courses in order to reach tangible outcomes ant to bring closer theory to practice.

At a local level, we mainly operate in the popular borough of Ballaro, at the heart of Palermo, in a multicultural reality where most of the migrant community is present. We also collaborate with organizations working in peripheral and rural areas of the city in order to address the issues and socio-cultural realities as early school leaving and high rate of criminal acts (due to high poverty and unemployment), integration of refugees and asylum seekers, and emigration of young people, due to lack of job opportunities.

More on: www.associazioneforme.com

N.E.W. LOOPS is a Portuguese non-profit organization based in Algarve since 2014. We aim at creating a network of change-makers and establishing a participatory educational platform that can lead to social, environmental and personal transformation.

We intend to propose practical solutions, adapted to both rural and urban areas, making it possible to match the satisfaction of people's needs and the preservation of the ecosystems, and to stimulate a new social and territorial dynamic based on the values of solidarity, freedom and sustainability.

We operate in an area (Algarve, South Portugal) strongly impacted by the financial crisis of 2008 and to the depopulation due to precarious, seasonal and low-paid working conditions and where mass tourism and intensive chemical agriculture dramatically threat the environment, especially along the coast. We therefore aim at supporting social and environmental regeneration, leading to permanent changes and eventually to a more sustainable future. We are looking for solutions to turn human settlements into healthy ecosystems and provide training to people so that they can take action.

Thanks to our transdisciplinary team, NEW LOOPS applies diverse methods such as non-formal education, permaculture techniques, visual and performative arts, social and environmental research. Through the organization of local trainings and workshops and our active participation in European projects, we enable people to come up with innovative solutions to tend towards sustainable living.

More on: http://newloops.spajkit.com/

Cinergies is a Greek social cooperative (5 co-funding active members) founded in mid-2016 whose purpose is to create and support alternative narratives to foster equitable and sustainable pathways.

The cooperative specialises in transmedia documentary production, and explores new mediums to cover events, share the important stories of our times integrating audio/video/photography to research and storytelling.

As a team, we gather a diverse set of people whose skills complement one another in order to document and recognize how people actively resist and shape transformational pathways.

We aim to concretely enable know-how and capacity-building services to support and further disseminate the achievements of social economy and sustainability initiatives that often suffer from a lack of visibility.

By giving voice to people that are disempowered by mainstream media, we provide an opportunity for people to become actors – agents– of change rather than merely spectators.

More on: www.cinergies.coop