The “A2UFood Training Kit”: Participatory Workshops to Minimize Food Loss and Waste

Abstract

The A2UFood project aspires to design and implement a holistic scheme for the management of food loss and waste, covering all aspects of the ‘reduce–reuse–recycle’ philosophy. An integral part of an efficient strategy to combat food wastage is raising awareness and informing the public. For this reason, among the designed direct, in person, communication activities of the A2UFood project, the ‘A2Food training kit’ has a key role. The kit includes a short theoretical background and nine sets of participatory activities, and it is the first of its kind implemented in Greece. After their evaluation through workshops, all proposed activities were included in an e-book for further use. Activities are based on the Education for Sustainable Development framework and the Sustainable Development Goals. The dissemination model employed draws on adult education theory, in the form of participatory workshops and also follows the ‘train the trainers’ principle. All the workshops are based on the principles of active learning, related to real life experience and cooperative learning. Following these principles, the activities designed for the workshops aimed to bring participants’ pre-existing experience, values, and beliefs into confrontation with a new context. Responding to COVID-19 pandemic limitations, necessary adjustments to distant training requirements were also implemented. Through the training kit, we have trained 270 trainers and, by the end of June 2021, 19 of them had implemented selected workshops for about 600 students, all over Greece. In conclusion, the multiplicative power of the kit is considered satisfactory under the given pandemic-induced social-distancing conditions, and it will have a lasting footprint alongside the informative campaign, since it will be available for use in the future, either as a tool for the training of trainers, or as material to be used by the trainers.