28–29 January 2025 · Idrija, Slovenia
At the end of January, the Planet PULSE partnership came together in the historic mining town of Idrija, Slovenia, for our first transnational project meeting of 2025. Hosted by ID20 in their offices inside the former engine room of the Inzaghi Shaft , a UNESCO World Heritage site, the meeting gave partners from across Europe a much-needed chance to reconnect in person, take stock of progress, and map out the busy months ahead.
For followers of the project and learners who will use the resources we are building, this post is a behind-the-scenes look at what we discussed and what's coming next.
Why we met
Planet PULSE — Youth Rising Above Climate Anxiety — is a co-funded European project that supports young people in understanding and processing the very real emotions that come with living through the climate crisis. Roughly halfway through the project's lifecycle, this in-person meeting was an important moment to align on quality, deadlines, and the European impact of our work. After settling in with an icebreaker (in which partners had to guess each other's favourite countries from cryptic clues, harder than it sounds), we got down to business across all our active work packages.
WP2: The Climate Awareness Guide & Resilience Framework
This is one of our flagship outputs, and there was real momentum to share. 21 youth stories have now been collected and added to our shared workspace, and the guide itself has been proofread. Pilot testing with young people is in its final stretch.
A particularly important conversation centred on the ethics of the toolkit. We want to be very clear with our community: the toolkit is not a diagnostic tool for climate anxiety or any mental health condition. It is a resource designed to help young people name and acknowledge what they are feeling about the climate crisis, and to build resilience together.
WP3: Building the Online Course
Albie from MMS led us through the timeline for the Planet PULSE online course and Open Educational Resources.
The course will be made up of six modules, each containing five to six subtopics, with partners taking the lead on the topics best suited to their expertise:
- Climate Anxiety
- Resilience
- Hope
- Community
- Empowerment
- Collective Action
Each module will be designed to suit the learning needs of young people in hopes to capture and sustain their attention! Partners are excited to move onto this next stage of development.
A warm thank you to ID20 and Idrija
It is hard to overstate how welcoming our Slovenian hosts were. Meeting in a 200-year-old engine room, surrounded by mining heritage and steep green valleys, gave the conversations a fitting backdrop, a reminder that taking care of our planet is also about respecting the places, communities, and stories we have inherited. Thank you to Nataša and the ID20 team for the seamless logistics and the warm Idrija hospitality.
What's next
Behind the scenes, work on the online course is ramping up, and we will start reaching out to stakeholders soon.
If you are following Planet PULSE because climate anxiety is something you, your students, or the young people you work with are navigating, thank you for being part of this. We are building these resources with you in mind, and we cannot wait to share them.
Stay tuned, and as always, you can keep up with the project at www.planet-pulse.eu.