Project Summary: Describe your contribution in one sentence
Introducing civic service in Greece as a way to empower and upskill youth while fostering active climate citizenship and national climate resilience.
What are the additional countries or territories of impact?
The program would also impact youth from other Member States of the European Union (EU). Ecogenia is part of the Collective for European Civic Service, advocating for the establishment of an EU-wide civic service scheme to allow mobility for young people in the context of completing a service term across any Member State of the Union. To achieve that, participating organizations of the Collective have been working to showcase the multiple socio-economic benefits of youth civic service. Ecogenia is among the most advanced organizations in the group able to demonstrate the transformational potential of the model. If we are successful in creating a national youth corps in Greece, organizations in other Member States will be able to benefit from our offering by applying lessons as they develop their own national programs and youth will have the opportunity to participate in exchanges in Greece in the context of pan-European civic service.
Challenge Focus: What topic does your project most directly relate to?
Website URL(s) or social media handles
Website: https://ecogenia.org/ LinkedIn: /ecogeniaorg IG: @ecogenia.gr FB: @ecogenia.org YouTube: @ecogenia2740
The Problem: What problem are you helping to solve?
Climate change poses a significant threat to Greece, and exacerbates its existing socio-economic challenges. Natural disasters - heat-waves, wildfires and floods - are becoming more common, severe and costly, undermining the country’s resilience and hindering its economic development.
Greece has the highest youth unemployment rate in the EU (39% under age 25). Migration out of Greece rose steeply in the past decade, with many youth leaving because they perceive no prospects for employment in their desired field or to begin an independent life (Pratsinakis, 2022).
While most young Greeks identify unemployment and climate change as their top two concerns (Ipsos poll, 2021) affecting their mental health and long-term prosperity, they lack opportunities to contribute to practical solutions to these challenges. Topped with limited green jobs training opportunities, Greek youth are unprepared to lead the country into net-zero.
Ecogenia’s solution is to recruit, train and compensate Greek youth, who need the paid work and practical skill development, to address pressing climate-related challenges. Ecogenia mobilizes youth in a climate corps through the civic service framework, a recognized best practice across various EU Member States and the United States, providing a practical model to integrate socio-economic development, cultural heritage, and ecological sustainability.
Your connection and commitment: How close are you to the problem and/or the community impacted?
My personal story is closely linked to the genesis of Ecogenia. When I graduated university at the peak of the financial crisis in Greece, I was faced with lack of opportunity and felt concerned about the future, as there were no clear prospects for pursuing a decent career in my field of interest. Moreover, there was no indication of light at the end of the tunnel. This experience really stuck with me and made me seek ways to empower youth who were faced with similar challenges as ‘younger me’, by helping them claim their rightful role as active citizens who can influence their country’s future.
In building our team at Ecogenia, it was thus very important that it represents our primary audience, young people across diverse backgrounds and skill sets complementing each other in their diversity. It was also very important to us that young people were consulted throughout our program development and that our work is largely youth-led. To achieve that we spend considerable time conducting research through surveys and focus groups with young people, and other stakeholders with experience in working with youth. Having a pool of 17 youth who have graduated from our program today, we continuously find ways to keep them involved as our work evolves.
Additionally, while working with local communities to address climate needs on the ground, we take a coalition-building approach, having built strong local advisory networks in target communities and conducting ongoing assessment to ensure the solutions we adopt correspond to the needs on the ground.
Finally, we are committed to also building bridges for Greek diaspora communities to play a role in and contribute to our work, influencing culture and changing the mindset of local and diaspora communities at the same time.
Your approach: How are you enabling other people to identify as green changemakers? How are you influencing them to get involved in your initiative or care about the issue you are addressing?
Ecogenia’s model is very intentional about enabling young people and local communities to identify as green changemakers.
First, youth are given much-needed employment opportunities and compensation to serve on practical community projects. By associating these opportunities with the green transition, corps members become equipped with a climate-conscious mindset and the tools to approach challenges with an active outlook. Our recruitment process is designed to reach people from diverse backgrounds and interests and is values-driven. Upon being selected, corps members undergo Ecogenia’s flagship active citizenship training, further supported by weekly mentoring and professional development to gain hard skills in the green space. Through teamwork, collaboration and co-living, they also acquire numerous soft skills. Working alongside like-minded peers to achieve a practical climate solution results in a rich experience that transforms these young people into effective changemakers and active climate citizens.
Second, we always invite local communities to the table with us while designing our projects. Not only is this a prerequisite to long-term sustainable impact, but it also results in more engaged host-communities who see the potential and value-add of leveraging Ecogenia’s model to achieve their climate action plans, or to develop such plans. This in turn has the power to encourage bolder climate-focused projects across the country, inviting local governments to think through a greener lens.
This year, we are launching an Ecogenia alumni network, as a forum for our graduated corps members to continue engaging with each other and our wider network as green changemakers, thus supporting the formation of Greece’s green workforce.
Community involvement: How is your approach involving community participation, especially the historically marginalized groups?
From our primary beneficiaries (youth in Greece, 18-30 y/o), to the local communities in the host-sites we serve, we seek every opportunity to engage the community to deliver a robust program.
From project design (consultation meetings) to project implementation (MoU) and monitoring/evaluation (community surveys), Ecogenia engages local stakeholders, including government agencies, civil society organizations (CSOs), and communities on project-sites to ensure local buy-in, the relevance and sustainability of the planned intervention, and the scale of the impact.
In terms of identifying potential impact areas, Ecogenia prioritizes under-resourced and secondary localities and embeds local stakeholder engagement from the onset. The community is invited to attend info-sessions, submit ideas for project enhancement and participate/lead training, sessions, and volunteer days.
Another important dimension is the interaction between corps members and local communities. Placing corps members in new communities where they are immersed and integrated for the duration of their term inspires a cross-generational exchange that can inspire a profound mindset and behavioral shift.
As we grow, we intend to make our program more accessible to youth from immigrant/newcomer backgrounds and develop projects where youth that are differently abled can also participate.
Your Innovation: What is different about your initiative compared to other solutions already out there? How is your approach original and innovative? We are particularly interested in solutions that use regenerative approaches.
Occupying the unique space between volunteering, paid work and professional development, youth service programs are proven to facilitate transformational experiences for young people, as demonstrated by the American (AmeriCorps), French (Service Civique) and other budding European and global models of youth development work.
Ecogenia’s solution is innovative as it leverages the youth service model to accelerate climate action and sustainable development for Greece. As a member of the Collective for European Civic Service, a pan-European network advocating for more EU support for civic service across Member States, we work with many youth development and aspiring civic service organizations across Europe. Ecogenia is unique among them, in that it activates young people in climate mitigation and adaptation efforts on the frontlines of climate change. The outcomes include a sensitized and climate-focused workforce that will go on to “infiltrate” every sector and drive green impact and protect Greece's natural resources - a unique dimension of civic service pronounced in Ecogenia’s model.
Secondly, it is innovative because Ecogenia is the first organization of its kind in Greece to offer paid service opportunities to unemployed/underemployed young Greeks as a way to address youth unemployment, upskill young people to effectively become more competitive in the job market and support talent retention in Greece. In Greece’s developing volunteering and CSO landscape, Ecogenia is the first organization to combine a community- and ecology- oriented mission with a robust professional development offering, and elevate it to be a paid opportunity. This is further enhanced by Ecogenia’s advocacy efforts aimed at institutionalizing civic service at the national level.
Founding Story: Share a story about the "Aha!" moment that led the founder(s) to get started or the story of how you saw the potential for this to succeed.
Upon graduating university in 2010, I went to the UK to pursue an MSc. After earning my degree, I was faced with a question: do I return home, where youth unemployment was skyrocketing due to the financial crisis, or do I stay abroad in hopes of a better professional future? I stayed.
As a Greek citizen and a homesick expat, not fully by choice, in these 13 years I have been preoccupied with the question of citizenship. How can I continue to be meaningfully connected to my country, especially in a period that called citizens to the polls often? What would my life look like if in 2011 I could have returned home, as was the plan? And what can I do today to change the course for young Greeks, who still face the highest unemployment rates in the EU?
The answers came when in 2020 I met Lia Papazoglou, a Greek-American working in sustainability like me. Through a virtual coffee, Lia shared her idea of empowering Greek youth through civic service. She had completed two service terms in the States, and had really benefited from the program when she had faced the same uncertainty as me entering the job market. I was inspired by her story, and left the call knowing that a Greek youth climate corps could be the vehicle to uplift the next generation while also addressing critical climate needs. A few days later, I called her back and said “I want to be your co-founder! Let’s do this!”.
Impact: How has your project made a difference so far? How is it contributing to a zero-carbon world- where every person thrives, and nobody gets left behind?
In less than 2 years of being operational, we have built a team of 8, creating 8 jobs in Greece. Of the full-time posts, 3 are filled by repatriated Greeks thus contributing to much-needed brain-gain.
In our first year of programming in 2022, we completed 2 pilot projects: an Ecotourism program in a vulnerable mountainous rural region, and an Education program in a medium-sized city. Through these pilots, we engaged 17 young people (18-3o y/o) from all over Greece in over 3,100 hours of service, directly reaching and engaging over 340 community members and organizing 2 volunteer days in the hosting communities.
In particular, through our Ecotourism program we built 5.5km of hiking trail and revitalized a public square. This is only the beginning of our long-term commitment to the area, where we hope to revitalize up to 60km of trail and support the local community to develop an ecotourism strategy to attract climate-responsible tourism as a way to reinforce the local economy. We envisage this to help change the way Greece thinks about forest areas, and demonstrate that our forests can be used as recreation areas in a way that highlights environmental conservation while reinforcing the connection of people to nature. Through our Education pilot, we engaged over 500 kids (10-12 y/o) and 22 teachers in sustainability education, and held the 1st kid-friendly Climathon in Greece.
What’s Next: What are your ideas for taking your project to the next level?
Ecogenia’s development plan involves piloting until the end of 2024, while in parallel continuing to advocate with relevant stakeholders to demonstrate the proof of concept and create the enabling frameworks needed to scale nationally.
In terms of scaling, we aspire to grow our programming from 10-week pilots to 8-12-month programs, and work across all 13 regions of the country, covering diverse terrain and spanning 5 programmatic areas (Ecotourism, Education, Conservation, Disaster Preparedness & Relief and Digital Corps) within a 10-year horizon.
In doing that, we are testing the “fee-for-service” framework, whereby we can work with stakeholders who need to get climate work done by providing them with teams of trained and activated youth at the frontlines of getting this work done, for a fee that would cover their stipends and training. This way, we can ensure that we are keeping young people in the country and that the climate movement in Greece is youth-led with social impact at its core.
Finally, a new National Capital of Youth initiative was recently announced acknowledging the need for municipalities to engage youth in developing solutions for local challenges, including climate change. Ecogenia is working to develop strategic partnerships with municipalities, for which our civic service model can play a foundational role in engaging youth to build climate resilience.
Your team: What is the current composition of your team (types of roles, qualifications, full-time vs. part-time, board members, etc.), and how do you plan to evolve the team’s composition as the project grows?
Our team currently consists of 8 members:
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4 on full-time basis, incl. my Co-Founder (Programs Director) and myself (Organizational Development Director), who both hold MSc degrees in sustainable development, our Development Manager and our Programs Manager
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4 at part-time capacity, incl. a Communications Coordinator, an Operations Associate, an Education Coordinator and a Programs Coordinator.
With our complementary backgrounds in the non-profit, private and public sectors and a skillset that spans policy, fundraising, program development, strategy, finance/accounting and storytelling, we are a diverse and gender-balanced team that complements each other very well.
We also have a working Board of Directors, comprising 3 unique industry experts from the sustainability, urban policy and social impact sectors.
We plan to grow the team by engaging two of our part-time staff on a full-time basis by the end of the year, and expanding our BoD by adding another two members before spring 2024.
Operational Sustainability Plan: What is this solution’s plan to ensure operational sustainability.
The Greek CSO space is plagued by limited resources. Knowing this, it has been our strategy from the start to secure diverse funding streams so as to ensure long-term viability. Ranging from foundations to corporate donors and European grants, we have also established a 5O1C in the United States, Friends of Ecogenia, to engage the Greek diaspora in empowering youth in Greece. We are also currently experimenting with the fee-for-service model, whereby municipalities, cities and prefectures can hire teams of Ecogenia corps-member to implement climate action projects for a small fee.
For Ecogenia’s model to be operationally sustainable in the long run, however, our program needs to scale through the creation of a national youth climate corps. This can only be achieved through a public-private partnership whereby the State will cover part of corps members’ stipends and social security contributions during their civic service term.
To ensure that this infrastructure is created, we invest in advocacy efforts to ensure the right legislation is passed. We're working with national agencies and policy-makers, incl. the Ministry of Labor, the Ministry of Environment, the Ministry for Climate Crisis and Civil Protection and the Public Employment Office. Our participation in the Collective for European Civic Service, also aims to support this national advocacy and our operational longevity.
VIDEO: Please share the link to a 1-minute YouTube video that answers the following “I identify as a Green Changemaker because...”. Ensure that your video does not exceed 60 seconds
https://youtu.be/s2ONcwj3SLs
Impact Model: While reviewing applications, we identified a need to better understand the impact models for the innovations that applied. How would you describe the activities you engage in and what outcomes and long-term impact do they lead to?
Ecogenia is mobilizing teams of young people (18-30 yrs old) to implement climate projects in underserved communities across Greece. Once a young person (cohort member or CM) is recruited through an online application process, they are placed on the field and trained to be able to execute the project they have been assigned to. Training includes:
- standardized aspects, like civic engagement, active participation, climate change, global environmental mandates, climate solutions, and
- project-specific training, like trail-building, ecotourism, working with children, first-aid and emergency response, conservation.
Once they complete their training, CMs move on to serve on their projects for 4 days a week, while they spend 1 additional day receiving critical skills and professional development training for the duration of their tenure. While they are with Ecogenia, CMs receive a living stipend that provides them with economic stability and are exposed to Ecogenia’s network of partners, which can lead to a job once they complete their service term, leading to job security.
So far, we have run 3 pilot projects in 2 programmatic areas: Ecotourism and Sustainability Education. To complete those, we have worked with the municipality in each program location, Dorida and Chania respectively, and expert CSOs to develop key aspects of the programs.
We are monitoring impact from the programs by keeping daily reports from the field and analyzing them weekly, and running various surveys with CMs and the community to measure their behavioral patterns towards active climate citizenship before and after Ecogenia’s intervention (see here & here). Our long term impact is a green-skilled workforce ready to deliver climate action on the ground, and critical projects implemented in areas in need.
Audience: Who are you most directly impacting through your work? Who is the target beneficiary? Please specify if the population you are reaching is underserved due to any of the following characteristics?
If you chose the "Other" option, please specify
How are you activating green changemakers?
If you chose the "Other" option, please specify
Organization Type: Which organization type best describes how your work or initiative has been organized or registered?
Nonprofit/NGO
Tell us briefly about how you have and/ or would like to engage partners or other changemakers to enhance your approach:
Cross-sector collaboration is at the core of our work. In building a national youth climate corps, we are effectively setting out to:
- support the public sector in accelerating Greece's climate agenda by driving climate impact on the ground; we are working with the Public Employment Service, and the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund to test the civic service model through short-term pilots, to subsequenlty draft and implement a nation-wide climate service policy
- train a climate-conscious young workforce that can add value to the private sector; we have engaged 25 young cohort members so-far and counting
- empower youth to become active climate citizens and changemakers, by modeling how to organize communities to address key challenges
- empower other CSOs in the space by forging programmatic partnerships
- work with foundations and companies alike to ensure funding is directed to critical climate work
- and support localities in addressing urgent climate mitigation and adaptation needs.
We pride ourselves in the partnerships we have built so far, both on the program implementation and coalition-building fronts. Moving forward, we are very excited about the possibility of leveraging the "fee-for-service" model to become a viable subcontractor for local climate projects mandated by municipalities/cities/ministries, that would otherwise get done at more cost with less social impact.
Annual budget: Hint: What is the cost for your current operations every year (or most recent year)? This is expenditure for your project or organization. The reference currency is the U.S. dollar.
$100k - $250k
Winning Impact Potential: How would winning the Green Changemakers Challenge impact and leverage your work?
Winning the GCC would be a great opportunity for our team, and for me personally.
From a recognition perspective - we are currently at a stage in our development, where the more recognition we receive from key stakeholders in the climate action space globally, the more trust we can inspire to Greek policy-makers and other key national stakeholders to help accelerate our agenda of institutionalizing civic service. Being associated with Ashoka as winners of this challenge, would allow us to accelerate our advocacy efforts and rally the right advocates behind our cause, so that every young Greek can have the opportunity to become an active climate citizen, no matter their background, geographic location and socio-economic status.
From a prize money perspective - these funds would cover significant operational expenses for our organization by financing my position as COO and Director of Engagement and Outreach. I have been building Ecogenia on a pro-bono basis while having a full-time job since May 2020, and due to the difficulties of fundraising to do non-profit climate and youth empowerment work in Greece, it was only in January 2023 that we were able to hire me full-time. Winning this prize money would secure my wages for a full year, and allow us to focus on raising money to run critical projects on the ground in order to yield impact for young people and communities in need.
Skills Matching: If you win, you may have the opportunity to be matched with HSBC employees for skill-based mentorship. If matched, which of the following skills would you be most interested in receiving?
Accounting & Finance
