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CONNECT wins prestigious Sustainable Energy Europe Award 2009 On the 11th of February 2009 CONNECT was awarded the Sustainable Energy Europe Award in the category ‘Promotional, Communication and Educational Actions’.
The Sustainable Energy Europe Awards Competition is an integral part of the Sustainable Energy Europe Campaign and highlights the successes of the most outstanding and innovative programmes or actions by rewarding those Sustainable Energy Partners most worthy of recognition and praise. The prospect of being showcased as an example of excellence propelled 631projects to register as partners in the SEE Campaign since its launching in 2005. The third round of the SEE Award Competition was open until the 31st of October 2008. For this round 251 candidates have been assessed by a technical committee according to set of predetermined evaluation criteria. This pre-selection process resulted in a short list of 25 nominees. An independent selection committee was appointed by the Commission to assess the SEE Awards finalists and named the Award winners in each of the 5 categories: Sustainable Energy Communities, Market Transformation, Promotional, Communication and Educational Actions, Demonstration and Dissemination projects and Cooperation Programmes.
The Awards Ceremony took place on the 10th of February at the Albert Hall in Brussels. CONNECT was awarded the Sustainable Energy Europe Award in the category ‘Promotional, Communication and Educational Actions’.
The jury gave praise to CONNECT for setting up new mobility campaigns where pupils and students have a central and active role. The high replication factor allows a snowball effect: more and more schools and children participating in the project and its aim to increase sustainable transport modes. The jury also noted and appreciated the realization of a project consortium that showed a good balance over Europe with a prominent involvement of newer member states.
On behalf of the consortium, Mobiel 21 as coordinator and initiative taker can say that we are very pleased with this award. It is a wonderful token of appreciation and recognition, not only for the work of the project partners, but in the first place for all the children, young people, teachers, schools and local communities involved in this project.
Photos and Videos of the Award Ceremony 2009 are available at
Sustainable Energy Europe
 The first year of the Traffic Snake Game, the campaign for primary schools, was a success. The first year the Traffic Snake Game has engaged 15,854 children from 76 schools in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovenia and the UK. During the campaign week, 88% of all trips were made by sustainable modes of transport. After the campaign we measured an 11% increase of eco-trips. Country results and more details can be found under section `Effects´.
Click here to see the results of Year 1  Now that the second year of our project has started we will encourage even more schools, pupils and parents to not only equal these numbers, but to exceed them. A lot of the participating schools already played a ‘deluxe’ version of the game, others played the basic version. This year we encourage all schools to go for the deluxe version as well.
More information on the basic and deluxe Traffic Snake Game can be found under section `Teachers´.
Click here for more information about the Traffic Snake Game
So how can we sustain eco-trips when children leave primary schools? Are young people interested and engaged to increase sustainable transport?
The ECO-TRIP campaign is a brand new CONNECT campaign targeting secondary schools, their teachers and pupils. The ECO-TRIP campaign will run for several months and exists of 4 stages. First, a debate session is to be held. In a second stage, the pupils take part in a video competition organised at school, national and European level. The ECO-TRIP week is the third stage of the project, in which pupils, teachers and other school personnel keep count of all sustainable trips to and from school during one week. Finally, during a final event, the winners of the European video contest will be announced.
Click here for more information about the ECO-TRIP campaign Schoolway.net in new designAs you can see, the website has a new and userfriendly design and we hope you enjoy the new tools on schoolway.net.
Schoolway.net focuses on successful awareness campaigns in the field of school mobility management that will be implemented in schools all over Europe:
- On the one hand the Traffic Snake Game `Eco-friendly and save to school´ for kids and
- On the other hand video campaigns themed on `mobility - environment - health´ for youngsters.
Teachers, children and youngsters find especially on their interests and requirements fitted information and materials all around the subject `mobility management at school´.
Especially we would like to draw your attention to the image gallery on the KIDS portal where schools and pupils have the possibility to put pictures of their Traffic Snake Game on Schoolway.net.
At the moment the YOUTH portal is still in elaboration on which you can get to know in close future more about the planned European-wide videocompetition.
 Kids and young people: An important target group for mobility managementYoung people are a very important target group for changing mobility modes, as mobility attitudes are deeply influenced by experiences at an early age. Furthermore, adults accompanying their children to school has a significant impact on their own mobility behaviour.
 Traffic education needs a boost from mobility managementExperience shows that children and young people are generally bored by traffic related issues because it reminds them of learning rules or having to do safety training.
Getting a driving-licence and using a car is a very important aim that children, especially teenagers, want to achieve upon reaching adulthood. Most children and adolescents do not formally learn how to use alternative transport modes, excluding bikes, or the advantages of using sustainable transport from their parents or in school.
 In fact parents accompanying their children in cars is the type of trip that is increasing the most.
But: Today’s children are tomorrow’s adult transport users and individual mobility behaviour is created at a very early age.
Road safety education therefore needs a boost from mobility education to show students and teachers alike that using alternative modes is fun and at the same time good for the environment.
The joy of developing and acheiving sustainable transport, of co-creating the future shall replace the lifted finger and fear of punishment. |
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