About this project

First Hand is an exploratory project by Forth as part of the LEVERS project. It benefits from Horizon Europe and UKRI funding.

Building on over a decade of helping public bodies, developers, networks and educators turn places into live learning labs, we’ve spent the past three years exploring climate learning and skills with an expert group of collaborators led by Trinity College Dublin.

Our rationale

We’re living through unprecedented change. Climate and ecological challenges require us to rethink - and relearn - how we work and live. Change is required faster than our learning institutions can keep up. Knowing classrooms alone won’t get us there, we need to unlock new ways to learn.

Unlocking new ways to learn

Our conventions say learning happens in structured, formal pathways, early in our lives.

But in a time of rapid change most of the skills we need will be built through learning in practice, in the real world, with others - we’ll learn on the job.

Open and Place-Based Learning can play a key role to ensure this learning is relevant and effective.

We’re already seeing these kinds of learning projects bubbling up across sectors, networks, boroughs and community organisations, responding to need. The OPEN WORKS database captures this emerging field: climate projects that are creating expertise, innovation, momentum and ecosystemic relationships through peer-learning in place.

We believe that these projects collectively demonstrate a pathway to how we scale access to climate action skills.

Learning as infrastructure

If we consider learning as critical infrastructure for change, the need to connect efforts and design ways for them to scale and persist becomes clear. Climate learning cannot solely be the responsibility of the education system, or of single organisations, sectors or disciplines. If we treat it as such it stays slow and small - pilot projects, short-term collaborations, isolated experiments and siloed learning.

What OPEN WORKS does

By bringing practical examples together in the database, we can:

make them visible and create confidence and inspiration for more open and place-based learning projects,
make them accessible and useful by finding patterns and extracting shared tools, models and principles, and
connect projects and evidence, to build collective momentum towards investment and scale.

Be in touch

We’re actively looking for opportunities to collaborate and scale these ideas.