Education for Sustainable Development
The world, and especially the younger generation, is facing major challenges. Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) helps young people to develop a comprehensive understanding of ecological, social and economic interrelationships in order to make sustainable decisions for the future. With its own focus on Education for Sustainable Development, the Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation supports projects by children and young people, school classes, teachers, educational institutions or extracurricular organisations with an ESD focus
What we support
We support projects by children and young people, school classes, teachers, educational institutions or extracurricular organisations in the Canton of Bern that are explicitly concerned with overcoming ecological challenges. Ecological topics should be considered in the context of cultural, social, economic and/or health aspects and must be organised in a participatory and, where possible, inclusive manner. Project submissions can take the following forms:
- Impulse projects e.g. organising an ideas workshop or hackathon
- Detailed projects with a thematic focus, project objectives, project plan, budget and financing concept
- Follow-up projects: continuations of projects that have already been successfully implemented and are now being repeated in a new context. This includes successfully completed impulse projects that require financial support for full realisation.
What we don’t support
The funding area “Education for Sustainable Development” does not support:
- Purely commercial projects
- Projects unrelated to ESD
- Projects with no connection to the Canton of Bern
- Skiing camps, school trips of all kinds (including study trips)
- Individual diploma projects or dissertations (for vocational college or higher education), research- and evaluation projects
- Projects focused on the expansion or renewal of infrastructure
- Projects that are already in the past
- The development of teaching materials (except for teaching materials that have been developed together with students in the context of participatory ESD projects)
Project Submissions
Projects can only be submitted online; they must fulfil the submission criteria, be submitted by the deadline and respect our funding conditions.
Contact
| bildungsprojekte@johnsonstiftung.ch | |
| Phone number | 031 372 25 95 |
Examples of Previously Funded Projects
Ausgewählte Projekte
eduLABs
In Bern, Thun and Emmental, eduLABs offers workshops in which students develop innovative solutions to complex problems. Together with their teachers, they receive inspiration and try out new teaching and learning concepts. Real and sustainability-related issues take centre stage: they develop projects that combine ecological, social and economic perspectives, experiment, design and engage creatively with sustainable development. The focus lays on the process: as researchers, they develop their own questions, test ideas and build prototypes. The eduLAB project loop, a simplified form of design thinking, encourages visionary thinking.
«Gemüse Ackerdemie»
For most children in Switzerland, contact with food happens at the supermarket. A lack of opportunities to experience nature leads to a loss of knowledge and skills in the area of food production and agriculture. This project of growing vegetables on the school’s own field is intended to counteract the resulting food waste, unhealthy diet and lack of appreciation of nature: on several levels, the “Gemüse Ackerdemie” (“Vegetable Farmcademy”) sensitises children to a lifestyle that is healthy for them and for our planet. According to the train-the-trainer principle, within four years it also enables teachers to use the vegetable field as a permanent learning centre in a didactically meaningful way and to continue doing so independently.
«Surprise macht Schule»
Surprise is the Swiss homeless-magazine (equivalent to the Big Issue in the UK), which also provides guided tours by homeless people and advocacy on the issue of homelessness. The educational workshop “Surprise macht Schule (“Surprise goes to school”) brings the topics of poverty, homelessness and marginalisation into the secondary school classroom. Young people enter into a direct dialogue with the workshop leaders from the Surprise association, who have fallen into the poverty trap for a variety of reasons and have experienced or are still experiencing homelessness and exclusion themselves. The central aim is to raise awareness of people affected by poverty and marginalisation. Direct encounters and dialogue with people affected by homelessness helps pupils to sharpen their understanding of other life circumstances, break down prejudices and understand social contexts.
«MITeinander – FÜReinander»
Discrimination is on the rise at Bethlehemacker school in the west of Bern. Teachers are observing increasingly aggressive behaviour in which different cultures are personally attacked and insulted. There is also a need to address gender issues. The project “MITeinander – FÜReinander” (“WITH each other - FOR each other”) aims to educate pupils on these issues in an age-appropriate way and help them to adopt an anti-discriminatory approach. The focus varies from level to level and the projects take place in parallel and several times a year. The project aims to re-establish the educational authority of teachers in a new way: Authority through power is replaced by a new authority through relationship work.