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“How can we finance actions for more nature in our school and our neighbourhood?” The school principals, teachers and students of the 9th Secondary School of Volos, Greece, were buzzing with ideas to develop sustainable solutions in their neighbourhood, and the question of the means to realise them was raised more than once!

These reflections took place at the occasion of the first Visionary Workshop organised by Ellinogermaniki Agogi in March 2023. The project partner presented various ways and methods to use Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) inside and outside the school settings. The series of Visionary Workshops should empower and engage schools and local communities to actively participate in developing and implementing sustainable solutions. The schools and local communities will be encouraged to adopt a Whole-School Approach, which aims to raise quality and standards across the entire school.

To this end, the project team will work together with school leaders, expert educators, students, researchers and experts using cooperative and instructional co-design methods in order to transform their schools into NBS School Living Labs. Living Labs are collaborative research and innovation environments where a diverse range of stakeholders come together to co-create and test new technologies, products, and services in a real-life setting.

This methodology aims to address the urgent challenges of climate change and environmental degradation faced by the local communities. Besides, from an educational perspective, the NBS Living Labs offer the opportunity of applied learning and cross-cutting skills development for students and teachers upon real-world challenges.

Immediate and drastic action is necessary to tackle issues such as extreme weather events, promote sustainable food systems, reduce air pollution, and overall, promote sustainable living. In this context, nature-based solutions offer a promising approach to address these challenges, by assuming that sustainable living has already been developed by nature for billions of years. By partnering with nature and enhancing biodiversity, we can manage sustainability challenges and create sustainable places and communities where schools, as an integral component of our societies, can play a pivotal role in promoting social innovation.