Process and progress of our project

After creating a group for the project, the first step we had to take was finding a goal we want to work on. As a group, we agreed on a goal very quickly. We will work on sustainability of cities and communities. This is because we are all very interested and passionate about the environment, ecology and connecting people to get them to work together try to solve problems.

We did some brainstorming, based on our own impressions of Athens. As Erasmus students, we all noticed that in our opinion, Athens is quite messy. It’s not what we are used to in our own countries. That got us to come up with our first idea: we wanted to create an online platform where people who feel the same way can connect and come up with and work on solutions for improving the environment in the city.

When we started to think about problems or obstacles that might occur when we want to realize the project, we figured out that we did not set a realistic goal. This because there might be some opposition from the government or big institutions or companies, there would be some technical issues with creating the platform, and also because the thing we wanted to reach was too broad.

Based on the data we found, and on our shared interests, we figured we should focus on the beach. There seems to be a lot of pollution on beaches and this can be dangerous for humans and animals. We got the very specific idea to create event(s) where we gather people to clean the beach. Our next challenge is to find a way to come up with some ideas to keep the beaches clean in the future, so that it will be sustainable. To do this, we will first focus on one specific beach. We will do some interviews and observations to find out where the problem lies, and then try to come up with innovative and creative ideas to keep this beach clean. If we manage to find a way to make it work, we will apply this to other beaches as well.