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ENABLS consortium meeting in Wageningen
On 6, 7 and 8th May, the eNaBlS consortium came together for their third live meeting, this time hosted by WUR-ELS in Wageningen.
To make the most of this live meeting, the organising team (Louise van der Stok, Mieke de Wit, Lian Kasper and Arjen Wals) tried to make the programme as inspiring and nature-inclusive as possible. “Partners were traveling from all over Europe to be here, so we wanted to maximise interaction and let them experience some of the elements we are working on with the eNaBlS Living Lab on Nature-inclusive Education at WUR” says Louise van der Stok.
After an informal dinner on the evening of 6 May, the first day started with an inspirational session by Mirjam Troost and Marta Eggers from Wageningen Student Challenges, showing how they engage students with topics such as NBS and biodiversity with challenge-based learning. To break the more formal sessions of the first day, there were three optional campus activities in the prolonged lunch break: a guided tour about biodiversity measures and implementation of NBS on the WUR campus by Martijn Hoenkamp (Services & Facilities), a nature sensing walk in de Blauwe Bergen by Sonja Greil (WSER), and an exercise ‘practice for nature based thinking’ by Yoram de Vos (student). Including these outdoor activities was much appreciated by the visitors, and several expressed that they will try to implement these experiences at home. The day ended with a reflective session in smaller groups, to practice relexive monitoring for the Living Labs. After a nice dinner at Soek Damascus the day ended with ice creams and beers.
The second day focused on the Living Labs and team building, with half of the programme taking place outside. The day started early with an optional birdwatching tour on campus guided by Hugo Loning (researcher Animal behaviour group). In the morning session, we matched several ‘coaches’ to the specific needs of each of the Living Labs. Marlies van der Wee (Rotterdam School of Applied Sciences, PhD candidate at ELS) gave an inspiring talk about Living Labs as learning environment to warm up to this session. Other coaches included Marta Eggers (Student Challenges), Evita Laheij and Evrim Emiroglu (students) and members of the eNaBlS project.
The morning session was concluded with a walk to the food forest, experienced from a non-human perspective. Everyone was pleasantly surprised to find a beautiful lunch lunch in this very special place on the WUR campus, prepared with products from the food forest freshly harvested by Louise and prepared by the Chef from Omnia, Djoelan Bovenschen. After a tour of the food forest by Louise and Kees van Veluw, the group again split up in three groups to either do some hands-on management work, biodiversity monitoring, or an ecoliteracy exercise by Ester Klein Hesselink. After everyone got back together, the meeting was closed by looking back on the programme, and what everyone took away from those two days. One of the partners summed it up very nicely: “This experience will stay with me!”.
Our partners expressing how they experienced the meeting:
Project website: https://enabls.eu/3rd-plenary-meeting/
Lithuanian partner website: https://zua.vdu.lt/en/enabls-project-partners-gathered-in-wageningen-university-to-advance-sustainable-change-through-co-creation-and-living-labs/
on LinkedIn:
Photo credits: Evita Laheij