Cultivating skills, habit change and collaboration to accelerate the green transformation.
Our mission is to accelerate the green transformation through inner development and reconnection to nature.
We cultivate skills and values that enhance sustainable action and foster habit change. We offer programmes in nature as well as online.
The programmes were co-created with scientists and show significant increases in nature connection, pro-environmental action and confidence in the future.
We are excited to be part of this and work hard to be active in all EU countries by 2025!
Cross-border/international
Germany
Belgium
Member State(s), Western Balkans and other countries: Netherlands
Member State(s), Western Balkans and other countries: France
Member State(s), Western Balkans and other countries: Sweden
Cologne, Brussels, The Hague, Stockholm, Lund, Paris and in the nature surrounding these cities.
It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organization, in partnership with other organisations
Name of the organisation(s): Inner Green Deal gGmbH Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Jeroen Last name of representative: Janss Gender: Male Nationality: Netherlands Function: Co-founder and co-managing director Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Genter Str 8 Town: Cologne Postal code: G-50672 Country: Germany Direct Tel:+32 491 98 96 14 E-mail:jeroen.janss@innergreendeal.com Website:https://innergreendeal.com/
Name of the organisation(s): Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS) Type of organisation: University or another research institution First name of representative: Christine Last name of representative: Wamsler Gender: Female Nationality: Germany Function: Professor Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Biskopsgatan 5 Town: Lund Postal code: 223 62 Country: Sweden Direct Tel:+46 70 494 22 29 E-mail:christine.wamsler@lucsus.lu.se Website:https://www.lucsus.lu.se/
Name of the organisation(s): Inner Development Goals Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Jan Last name of representative: Artem Henriksson Gender: Male Nationality: Sweden Function: Executive Director Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Norr Malerstrand 14 Town: Stockholm Postal code: 112 20 Country: Sweden Direct Tel:+46 70 951 44 19 E-mail:jan@innerdevelopmentgoals.org Website:https://www.innerdevelopmentgoals.org/
Our mission is to accelerate the green and just transformation through inner development and reconnection to nature.
We cultivate skills and values that enhance sustainable action and foster habit change. We offer programmes in nature as well as online.
Our programmes are evidence-based, building on a 4-year collaboration with Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS) from Sweden and a range of partners that include the EU and UN. Programme evaluations show significant increases in nature connection, pro-environmental action, confidence in the future and a belief that I can have impact.
As a result of such findings, our programmes were integrated in the standard learning catalogue of all EU staff. We are now also working with the UN, preparing similar programmes for UNDP staff and their stakeholders.
For 2023, to have local impact, we focus on two specific learning communities with the help of our partners:
- Young activists through our partnership with the Dutch Youth Climate Movement with whom we are organising a first free pilot programme in nature around climate leadership and resilience skills, essential given high burn-out rates (see letter).
- The large community of trainers, coaches and local change makers through our partner the Inner Development Goals (part of this application) who already animate 100+ hubs and who we are helping through tools and train-the-trainer programmes, so that they can accelerate change across Europe.
To support these learning communities, we have developed digital learning solutions, including a social learning platform and a mobile application with guided nature walks, meditative practices and relevant content.
The NEB Prize money and recognition would be extremely helpful and would allow us to accelerate our translation efforts, recruitment of local trainers and support our fundraising capability so that we can offer programmes in a maximum number of EU countries and languages by 2025.
Nature
Skills
Community
Collaboration
Action
Our overall guiding objective is to accelerate the green and just transition.
Our research shows that such an acceleration is most likely to come through addressing the human dimension of sustainability: reflecting on our beliefs and values, fostering habit change and cultivate skills that enhance sustainable action. And to do this in nature.
Below an overview of our specific objectives and how we worked towards them:
1) Create understanding among key stakeholders in the EU and globally that climate action needs skills and inner development. Progress included:
a. Convincing both the EU and the UN to integrate our programmes in their learning offering to staff.
b. Launching the “Inner Green Deal podcast”, reaching thousands of people.
c. Speaking at leading events, including at COP26 and COP27.
2) Create experiences and programmes that have concrete impact. Progress included:
a. Positive academic evaluations of our programmes with findings that included significant increases in nature connection, pro-environmental action, confidence in the future and belief that “I can have impact”.
3) Link insights and learning to concrete action that accelerates the green and just transition. Progress included:
a) Commitment from 500+ participants in our programmes to concrete behaviour change.
b) Inclusion of “action-labs” in one day and longer programme – with over 40+ initiatives launched.
c) Integration of learnings into worklife with 83% of participants intending to integrate sustainability more at work over the next 12 months.
4) Create a thriving community to scale learning in Europe and globally. Progress included:
a) Created monthly community meetings and nature walks in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands and seeking to add at least 5 more countries this year, reaching all EU Member States by 2025.
b) Created an online Green Hub community with the Inner Development Goals. Together we have over 10.000 followers on Linkedin.
For people to move towards a greener and more just society, they need to be inspired, emotionally engaged and resilient.
Our biggest ally is nature and our primary objective is therefore to bring people into nature and allow them to be touched by the beauty of nature.
But being in nature is not a guarantee for truly connecting with nature. Below an overview of our more specific objectives and how we worked towards them:
1) Create opportunities for people to learn in nature. Progress includes:
a. Organised since 2020 regular 2-hour open community walks in nature near Brussels, Cologne and The Hague.
b. Organised a 2-day climate leadership programme for EU managers of which 1 day was fully outside in a forest.
2) Teach people to slow down and truly connect to nature. Progress includes:
a. Integrated in our programmes specific methods (see section on innovation) that enhance nature connection, including opening all senses (seeing, hearing, smelling etc) walking slowly in silence, observing nature, body mind practices such as mindfulness and more specifically environmental compassion meditation.
3) Invite people to express their gratitude and appreciation for nature. Progress includes:
a. Integrated in our programmes specific methods such as dialogues, drawing, writing poetry and taking pictures.
b. Launching a collaboration with LiveGreen and Climatelive to invite musicians around Europe to create original music to inspire people to connect and care for nature.
It is vital that climate and environmental action is inclusive. Not only because it’s the right thing to do, but also because a transformation that is not accessible or affordable or shared, simply won’t work.
Here is how we try to ensure that that our programmes are inclusive:
1) Co-creating our programmes with a highly diverse team. Progress includes:
• Through our collaboration with EUSA and UNDP and the global community of the Inner Development Goals, we co-designed our methods with a diverse core team and a very large extended group that includes 100+ researchers and facilitators from around the world.
• Having rolled out our programmes in Europe, we are now testing our programme outside Europe (see below).
2) Deliver our programmes for free to those that need it most. Progress includes:
• In 2022, we launched the Global Leadership for Sustainable Development programme, offering 120 change makers in Costa Rica, Colombia, Rwanda, Zambia, Albania and India the opportunity to participate in a transformative and free online programme.
• In 2023 we are launching a summer retreat for climate activists from around Europe – together with our partner the Dutch Youth Climate Movement (representing 50 youth organisations).
3) Make our curricula available to the global facilitator and coaching community. Progress includes:
• Through our outreach partners we are seeking to connect with many thousands of facilitators and partners that can bring our programmes to their communities. This includes 180+ global offices of UNDP, the global change makers community of Ashoka and the 100+ hubs around the world of the Inner Development Goals.
• We are in the process of offering our programme curricula to the global community of facilitators and coaches through our technology partner Kudima. This allows facilitators to access the learning platform, mobile app and supporting materials to enable them to offer the programmes to their local communities.
Our Inner Green Deal organisation is through its German founding statutes an organisation for the public good (“gemeinnützige gmbh”).
We strive to serve the common good and civil society in multiple ways:
1) Offer programmes that seek to accelerate the green and just transformation through inner development and reconnection to nature.
• We work with people and organisations with systemic societal impact– including the European Commission and the United Nations Development Program. As indicated before, our programmes had concrete and measurable impact on the mindset of participants, their decisionmaking and on the initiatives they created during and after the programmes.
• We also work with a range of outreach partners, tapping into their communities and trainer base to reach more people. Partners include the European School of Administration, the United Nations Development Program, Ashoka, Awaris, Fridays for Future, LiveGreen, the Dutch Young Climate Movement and The Mindfulness Initiative.
2) Create communities that are inclusive and create social cohesion. Bringing people together in nature, not only makes them more likely to demonstrate pro-environmental action, but also to be more balanced, healthy and pro-social. These benefits are widely researched as indicated for the attached article from Professor Wamsler.
3) Create concrete initiatives and volunteering that improves local communities
a. As reconnecting to nature and environmental compassion creates pro-environmental behaviour, it has been easy to ask for volunteers to come together for clean-ups and other concrete local initiatives. We piloted a first programme in Brussels in 2021 and are creating a collaboration with the global volunteering organisation “Serve the City”.
We have collaborated with a very broad range of stakeholders at the local, regional, national, European and global level and based on their valuable feed-back, were able to develop well rounded, evidence-based and robust programmes.
In 2020 we developed a first workshop around Climate Leadership and managed to get the interest from the European School of Administration (the main inhouse EU learning institute). Together we created a first pilot version of the Climate Leadership programme, an online 7-module programme for policy-makers and decision-makers.
The programme was piloted with 100 leaders and policy makers, including 2 groups from EU Institutions and 2 open groups including academics, corporations, NGOs and facilitators.
The programme was very well received and we had several meetings to collect feed-back. After that, EUSA invited us to include our programmes in their standard learning catalogue, available to all EU staff.
We then partnered with the “Inner Development Goals”, a non-profit with over 100+ hubs around the world and together we decided to test our programme outside the Western context. In 2022, we launched a programme for 120 local change makers in Costa Rica, Colombia, Rwanda, Zambia, Albania and India. Initial findings show that sustainability cannot be separated from social and economic development. We also are learning more diverse cultural perspectives and the power of intergenerational work.
Through our work with UNDP and its Conscious Food Systems Alliance, we are interacting with 100+ local, national and international partners in the food sector where we receive valuable feed-back in preparation for our new programmes with UNDP – including one for policy makers and one for local farming communities.
Finally, we are preparing for 2023 climate leadership and resilience programmes for young activists and are collaborating with the Dutch Youth Climate Movement to co-create a programme that meets their needs.
From the beginning of the Inner Green Deal initiative, our intention was to create programmes that combine both the inner dimension (mindset, values, skills, systems thinking, etc) and outer dimension (behaviour change, collaboration, prototyping) of the green and just transformation.
Since 2020, we have been working closely with Professor Christine Wamsler of Lund University Centre of Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS), a global expert on the linkage between mindfulness/compassion and sustainability, as well as other experts such as Jamie Bristow from the Mindfulness Institute.
As our Inner Green Deal team has a 30+ year background in teaching mindfulness and compassion, we developed a programme that included mindfulness and compassion components, including a 10-minute environmental compassion exercise.Upon evaluation by LUCSUS, we found a positive connection between compassion and pro-environmental behaviour which confirmed our experience and broader research.
Professor Wamsler introduced us to the team of the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) who were working with researchers like Robert Keegan (Harvard) and Peter Senge (MIT) and we were fortunate to be able to include their methods on Immunity to Change, complexity thinking and prototyping.
Our collaboration with the IDGs team grew and in 2022 we launched our first programme together, combining our Climate Leadership programme and their IDG framework which is based on a review of 1000+ researchers and practitioners (see also the question on methodology).
Finally, content on sustainability science came from open sources as well as the European Commission (DG RTD, CLIMA and ENV) and UNDP policymakers who participated in our programme and provided valuable links to research and content.
Our work is considered highly innovative by our participants (EU/UN) who are often themselves experts in sustainability but not necessarily experts in inner development or climate leadership.
Our work is also considered highly innovative by the learning and development community who only recently started to focus on sustainability and who typically focus on technical skill development and often do not tap into participants’ full potential to support change, providing and understanding of the need for more integrative approaches at individual, collective and system levels.
To be more specific:
Our work is multi-disciplinary and combines inner development with sustainability in new ways
- The research field linking inner development and sustainability is an early stage and we benefit hugely from the expertise from Professor Christine Wamsler of LUCSUS, a global expert on the linkage between mindfulness/compassion and sustainability.
- Together with Professor Wamsler from Lund University, we evaluated our-pre and post programme surveys and found a connection between compassion and pro-environmental behaviour. Building on this insight we developed a 10-minute environmental compassion exercise which we believe is unique (attached).
- We also benefit from the expertise from our partners, including the EU and UN and researchers like Robert Kegan (Harvard) and Peter Senge (MIT) through our collaboration with the Inner Development Goals.
Our delivery model is highly dynamic seeking to optimize impact. It combines:
o Class-room learning (4-8 modules)
o Action based learning: participants bring in real-life sustainability challenges from their workplace or community
o Online social learning (content around which people interact on a platform),
o Mobile app with guided nature walks and meditation practices
o An Action Lab where people develop new initiatives through a module of agile learning
o Ongoing community interaction and support
Our programmes are already being replicated and transferred through our delivery and technology partners.
This is fully in line with the statutes of our non-profit organisation. We therefore do not seek to protect our intellectual capital but rather try to share our methodology to increase societal impact.
Concrete progress includes:
- In our contracts with both the EU and the UNDP, we ceded ownership of our materials and allowed them to share our curricula with internal and external facilitators so that our programmes can be scaled going forward.
- With both the EU and UNDP, we are training their staff to co-facilitate programmes together.
- Through our outreach partners we are potentially connecting with many thousands of facilitators and partners that can bring our programmes to their communities. This includes 180+ global offices of UNDP, the global change makers community of Ashoka and the 100+ hubs around the world of the Inner Development Goals.
- We are in the process of offering our programme curricula to the global community of facilitators and coaches through our technology partner Kudima. This allows facilitators to access the learning platform, mobile app and supporting materials to enables them to offer the programmes to their community.
- In 2022, we launched our first Mindfulness-based Sustainable Transformation (MBST) programme, tapping into the global community of over 1 million mindfulness trainers worldwide. In 2023 we will offer a train-the-trainer programme enabling mindfulness trainers to bring the MBST programme to their local communities.
Our approach is based on the scientific evidence that our beliefs, worldviews, values and associated inner capacities lie at the root of our sustainability challenges – leading to increases in ill-health at individual, collective and planetary level.
Our methodology seeks to address these root causes and is based on a recent multi-disciplinary model of inner-outer transformation, that builds on a review of current work in the field, in particular that of Professor Wamsler of Lund University (with whom we have a 4-year research agreement).
The model was developed by our partner the Inner Development Goals with the support of a large academic panel and input from two global surveys in which over 1.000 academics and practitioners participated.
The model consists of 23 skills and qualities grouped in five categories. Our 6-module programme includes an introduction to sustainability and then guides participants through each of the 5 listed categories below, cultivating qualities and stimulating collaboration module by module:
1. Being: relationship to self: deepening our relationship to our thoughts, feelings and body help us be present, intentional and non-reactive when we face complexity.
2. Thinking: cognitive skills: developing our cognitive skills by taking different perspectives and making sense of the world as an interconnected whole, is essential for wise decision making.
3. Relating: caring for others and the world: appreciating, caring for and feeling connected to others, such as neighbors, future generations or the biosphere, helps us create more just and sustainable societies.
4. Collaborating – social skills: develop our abilities to include, hold space and communicate with stakeholders with different values, skills and competencies.
5. Acting – driving change: qualities such as courage and optimism help us acquire true agency, break old patterns and act with persistence in uncertain times.
Our mission is to address the global climate and environmental crisis and accelerate the green and just transition through both working with systemic global actors (EU/UN) and provide local solutions.
Our work focuses on the human dimension of sustainability: reflecting on our beliefs and values and cultivating qualities that enable collaboration and impactful action.
The local dimension of our work is felt in different ways:
Training facilitators and coaches who bring our programmes and interventions to their local communities. We are working with a range of delivery partners with strong local networks:
o Young activists through our partnership with the Dutch Youth Climate Movement (representing over 50 local youth movements).
o Farmers and their communities through our partnership with UNDP’s Conscious Food System Alliance (CoFSA).
o Change makers through our partnership with Ashoka
o Mindfulness facilitators through our partnership with Awaris and the Global Mindfulness Institute.
Creating a thriving community to connect change makers locally
• Creating monthly online and in person community meetings and nature walks in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands.
- Create concrete initiatives and volunteering that improves local communities
o As reconnecting to nature and environmental compassion creates pro-environmental behaviour, it has been easy to ask for volunteers to come together for clean-ups and other concrete local initiatives. We piloted a first programme in Brussels in 2021 and created a collaboration with the global volunteering organisation “Serve the City”
We feel we made significant progress against our objectives during the 3+ years of our Inner Green Deal initiative.
Created understanding among key stakeholders in the EU and globally that climate action needs inner development.
- Convinced both the EU and the UN to integrate our programmes in their learning offering to staff.
- Launched the “Inner Green Deal podcast”, reaching thousands of people.
- Spoke at leading events, including at COP26 and COP27 [include links to events].
Created experiences and programmes that created a positive shift in mindset.
- Positive academic evaluations of our programmes with findings that included significant increases in nature connection, pro-environmental action and confidence in the future and belief that “I can have impact”.
- Positive endorsements from the facilitator community, leading to the development of train-the-trainer programmes.
Linked insights and learning to concrete action that accelerates the green and just transition.
- Commitment from 500+ participants in our programmes to concrete behaviour change.
- Inclusion of “action-labs” in one day and longer programme – with over 40+ initiatives launched.
- Integration of learnings into worklife with 83% of participants intending to integrate sustainability more at work over the next 12 months
Created a thriving community to scale learning in Europe and globally.
- Creating monthly community meetings and nature walks in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands.
- Creating an online community with the Inner Development Goals. Together we have over 10.000 followers on Linkedin.
Our mission is to accelerate the green and just transformation through inner development.
The programmes and experiences we offer develop competencies (attitudes, skills and knowledge) that are very similar to those described in the recently published European Competence Framework on Sustainability.
Comparing the EU framework with our method with its five categories (being, thinking, relating, collaborating and acting) we find that both begin with valuing and embodying sustainability. Our programmes start with what value about nature, how we relate to the current state of the planet and a reflection on why we let it come so far and what motivates us to address the current crisis.
We continue in our second “Thinking” module with critical thinking, reviewing the mental models that may have contributed to the current crisis. In this module we cultivate systems thinking, complexity thinking and perspective taking – all very similar to the second part of the EU Framework about “embracing complexity in sustainability”.
In our third module we examine how we relate to the world around us and we cultivate appreciation, caring for and feeling connected to others, such as neighbors, future generations or the biosphere. As in the EU Framework, we seek to envision sustainable futures in which all beings can thrive – knowing that we are so interdependent.
Finally in our fourth and fifth modules, we move into action and collaborate around specific initiatives in an Action Lab and then seek to integrate what is learned in our community or workplace. This is similar to the EU Framework’s acting for sustainability and similarly cultivates competencies that enable effective collaboration such as social and communication skills, embracing diversity, agile working methods as well as attributes such as courage and optimism.
