Organisation: Socialinių idėjų dirbtuvė (CoolŪkis project) 

Website: http://www.coolukis.lt/

Dates: The project has been going on since winter of 2016.

Place: Vilnius and Kaunas, Lithuania

Description of the activity:

We connect people who want to grow their own vegetables, fruit or flowers with people who have land that they would like to share for gardening. People register for free online or by calling us and we match them up based on their preferences. They then arrange to meet and decide if the match works for them. If it does, they go on to garden together and socialise while sharing land, knowledge and skills.

The landowners are often elderly people who can no longer maintain their gardens and so the project aims to help them not only with garden work, but also to feel more needed and useful. This is another aim of the project – to reduce social exclusion of the elderly, all by creating opportunities for people to live more sustainably themselves.

We have also organised around 10 free gardening and sustainable lifestyle workshops so far, produced educational materials and we write a blog that educates on living more sustainably. Workshops are run by student volunteers who are mostly ecology students. This gives them an opportunity to learn valuable presentation skills and to share their knowledge. Through our activities we are promoting sharing resources, living a healthy and sustainable lifestyle.

What was the environmental problem:

More and more people are moving to cities which leads to them losing touch with nature.  By giving them an opportunity to spend time in nature and garden we are bringing them closer to nature, educating them about how food is grown and preserving our gardening culture. We promote organic gardening which also reduces people’s impact on the environment.

Through the workshops we run and our blog we are helping people to live more sustainably, which has a positive impact on a variety of environmental problems. Composting workshops help reduce waste that would end up in the landfill leading to better waste management and composting means people are creating a natural fertilizer making chemical fertilisers obsolete which also have a negative impact on the environment. Other workshops such as our insect hotel workshop help to maintain biodiversity.

The result of the activity:

So far about 30 people have been gardening at 14 different garden places, growing organic vegetables around Vilnius and Kaunas. About 200 people have come to our gardening and sustainable lifestyle workshops overall, where they learnt the basics of gardening, how to garden, compost indoors, make insect hotels and natural cosmetics. Even more have read our blog and follow our Facebook page (almost 2000 followers) where we spread awareness and educate about how to minimise your impact on the environment, how to live more sustainably and what other people are doing to solve environmental problems.

Video about the project:

Environmental challenge accepted - Public vote

Main page of the project