Green Skills

Green Skills for Rural Development is an Erasmus+ mobility project in the field of adult education, coordinated by Association Petite Graine, a non-profit organisation based in Bagnères-de-Luchon in the French Pyrenees. The project ran from 1 June 2025 to 31 January 2026 and was designed to respond to a concrete need within the organisation: strengthening its methods for training and supporting adults in rural areas.

APG works on sustainability, social entrepreneurship and community-based initiatives through non-formal education. As a small newcomer organisation in the adult education field, it wanted to learn from transferable European practices in order to better connect sustainable entrepreneurship, educational facilitation, learner support and digital tools.

The project was built around job shadowing mobilities in Italy for three staff members. These mobilities made it possible to observe educational practices, mentoring approaches and blended learning formats that could later be adapted to APG’s own work in rural France. The project had three main objectives: to strengthen staff expertise in rural sustainable entrepreneurship, improve their ability to provide longer-term support to learners, and develop their skills in digital or blended learning to widen access to education.

Beyond the mobility itself, the project is meant to improve the organisation’s regular practice. It supports the development of more structured training activities, better follow-up for learners, and educational formats that are more relevant to rural realities. For other associations, the project also offers a simple example of how a small rural organisation can use Erasmus+ to build staff capacity, strengthen European cooperation and gradually improve the quality of its adult education work.