Within the German pilot project, the Heinrich-Böll-Foundation Schleswig-Holstein (SH) acts as a facilitator for civil society to engage in democratic debates. They foster energy transition by empowering citizens through practice-oriented courses, building regional and local energy networks, and encouraging citizen initiatives.
The local RENCOP (renewable energy cooperative partnership) is built a little differently than in our other pilot projects. Here, it presents a regional strategic network and entails key regional civil society actors – such as the Country Women’s Association. In the following, we present to you what they have been working on.
Climate-friendly Cooking
What does cooking have to do with renewable energy, you might wonder. At first glance maybe not much, yet the way we eat can have a significant impact on the climate. That’s why the Country Women’s Association together with the Heinrich-Böll-Foundation SH formed the group “Treffpunkt des Guten Geschmacks” (meeting place for good taste) to create a cooking-app and provide people the ability to know and eat what’s good – for us, the region and the climate.
The result is a climate-friendly, seasonal, and regional cooking app that helps to reduce the individual CO2-footprint and improve working conditions in the supply chain. Long transport routes, refrigeration, and storage become almost needless by consciously choosing regional and seasonal products over imported ones. Thus, it puts a focus on the often unnoticed local diversity of fruits and vegetables and inspires people to (re-)discover, for example topinambour, wild garlic, or parsnip.
Providing suitable recipes for every season, the app is scheduled to be published in autumn 2021 and will invite everyone to participate, try recipes, add new ones, and exchange their tasty experiences.
To give you an inspiration, here’s a recipe that the group has tried already: Turnip with a mustard-sugar-crust. Looks tasty, doesn’t it?
Raised garden bed at Anscharpark, Kiel
Another project that was born out of the local network is a raised garden bed at Anscharpark, Kiel. Jochen Bock, the gardener from Nordkolleg in Rendsburg who initiated the project, provided wood from hist own spruce forest, while local waste management supplied the compost ground. Herbs, vegetables and all kinds of edible plants can grow here. Aiming at making gardening available as an experience and self-empowerment exercise, it enables people to see food grow in real-time and receive a hands-on understanding of the effort it takes. Immediately, the garden bed received a lot of positive feedback from the local community. Who knows, maybe this could even grow into a bigger urban gardening project beyond Anscharpark.
