Skills for sustainability are rarely learnt in a classroom alone. More often they grow where people work through real problems together: informal networks, working groups, communities that learn by doing.
That is the starting point for CPG (Community of Practice on Green Skills for Organizations’ Human Capital), an Erasmus+ KA210-VET project bringing together organisations from Bulgaria, Italy and Spain to explore how communities of practice can spread a culture of sustainability inside small and medium-sized organisations.
The project has now published its first output: the Sustainable Practices Case Studies Compendium. Put simply, it is an open collection of twelve real cases from Italy, Spain and Bulgaria, where groups of people learn together how to make their work more sustainable. Each case is documented and analysed using the same method (the European GreenComp framework and the eight success facets of communities of practice), alongside research that compares the four contexts. It is a resource for anyone who wants to understand how these communities actually work and take away concrete examples.
One finding stands out. Communities of practice act as informal learning environments for green skills, and they are far more common than official data suggests, because they often operate under other names such as networks, coalitions or working groups. They work best when membership is voluntary, trust is real, and facilitation is shared rather than resting on a single person.
The compendium is free to download and reuse, and it forms the evidence base for the community of practice model the project will build in its next phase.
Coordinated by GBG (Bulgaria) with OpenCom and SYDIC (Italy), MEUS (Spain) and EEB Euro Education Bulgaria (Bulgaria).
đź”— Document link: https://cpgproject.eu/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/OER-Sustainable-Practices-Case-Studies-Compendium_CPG_A2.pdf