Green Stride: Why We Started, Where We've Been, and What's Coming Next

When the FURIM team first sat down with our partners from ABARKA in Spain and WalkTogether in Bulgaria back in February 2025, none of us had a tidy answer for one simple question: what does it actually look like when young people reconnect with nature?

We had hunches. Cycling helps. Time outside helps. Mindfulness helps. But hunches don't move a project forward, so we used the Oslo kickoff on 11 February 2025 to turn those hunches into a 15-month plan.

That plan is Green Stride. It's co-funded by the European Union, it runs across three countries, and it's built around a question we keep coming back to: how do you give young people the space, the tools, and the reasons to slow down and look up?

The kickoff in Oslo

The first partner meeting wasn't glamorous. It was laptops on a long table, coffee, pastries, and a lot of arguing about timelines. We aligned on objectives, sketched out the upcoming Learning, Teaching and Training Activity in the Basque Country, and locked in the project's three pillars.

The first one is outdoor adventures: cycling, hiking, and movement that builds energy and confidence. The second is ecopsychology, using time in nature to ease stress and rebuild attention. The third is Km0 tourism, the kind of local, low-impact travel that respects the places we move through.

The other thing the kickoff did was less measurable. It gave the partners faces. Cross-border projects live or die on whether the people running them trust each other, and sitting in the same room for two days made the rest of the year easier.

Building the foundation: the Communication Plan

After Oslo, the work moved online. The first deliverable was D1.1, the Communication Plan. It sounds dry. It is dry. But it's also the thing that lets a three-country project speak with one voice.

The plan covers Green Stride's visual identity (the logo, color palette, and templates) along with the channels we use to reach young people, youth workers, and partner organizations. With that in place, anything we publish from here on out feels like part of the same project, even when it comes from three different teams.

The Basque Country: when the project hit the road

Between 24 June and 3 July, we ran a 10-day Learning, Teaching and Training Activity in the Basque Country. This was the first time Green Stride moved out of meeting rooms and onto bikes.

We covered more than 200 km of cycling across cities, coastline, and rural roads. Days were filled with workshops on sustainability, bike repair, eco-cycling, and storytelling. Mornings often started with ecopsychology practices like forest bathing and mindful pedaling. We also stopped by the Danzas del Mundo 3.0 festival, which gave the week an unexpected cultural dimension.

The bike repair workshops were a small surprise. We'd planned them as practical content. They turned into the most popular part of the week, partly because nobody likes feeling helpless when something breaks, and partly because grease on your hands is a fast way to bond with strangers from another country.

Participants told us at the end of the LTTA that they felt healthier, more aware of their environment, and clearer in their heads. We didn't measure this with a clinical instrument and we won't pretend we did. But the answers were consistent enough across the group that I trust them.

What's been happening since

Each partner has been running local activities. In Oslo, FURIM hosted a Mindful Movement workshop with 12 young people, focused on stretching, balance, and group flow sessions. We followed that with a cycling event for sustainability, organized with Technogarden, that brought in over 30 participants and focused on bikepacking light and traveling with a smaller footprint.

In Spain, ABARKA led a youth mobility along the Basque coastline, riding into France and joining sustainability workshops along the way. WalkTogether is preparing the next phase in Etropole, Bulgaria.

So far, more than 40 young people have joined Green Stride workshops or rides. Youth workers across the three partner organizations have picked up practical skills in ecopsychology and outdoor education. And we're starting to see the small daily shifts you hope for in a project like this: more cycling, more mindfulness, greener habits at home.

The Wellness Guide

Alongside the events, we've been writing the GreenStride for Youth Wellness Guide. It pulls together what we've learned into something usable: cycling as a tool for community connection, ecopsychology methods that hold up in real groups, and workshop structures for sustainability and storytelling.

The guide is being finalized now and will be published openly. The point isn't to produce another PDF nobody reads. The point is to give youth workers, NGOs, and local groups a starting kit so they don't have to invent everything from scratch.

What's next

Early next year, we're running an online youth leaders' webinar with around 30 participants from Norway, Spain, and Bulgaria. The agenda is simple: share what's worked, exchange honest feedback, and start mapping ideas for what comes after Green Stride.

We're also preparing multiplier events to share results locally and inspire other organizations to run something similar. And we'll keep launching outdoor activities across the three countries, with the goal of involving more than 100 young people by the end of the project.

Why we keep doing this

There's a line we've used a few times in our materials: when young people thrive in nature, our communities and our planet thrive with them. It sounds like a slogan, and it is one. But it's also the thing we keep proving to ourselves on every ride.

If you want to follow the project, the easiest way is to find FURIM Institutt online: website, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. New stories and event invites go up regularly. And if you'd like to bring something like this to your own community, get in touch. The whole point is to keep the movement growing.

Green Stride is co-funded by the European Union and delivered in partnership with FURIM Institute (Norway), ABARKA (Spain), and Association WalkTogether (Bulgaria).


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