What is a Learning Community?
This module offers guidance from building and working with a Learning Community based on the work of the PLANET4B project, however much of the content offers transferable skills for working in any capacity with any community, building effective, trusting relationships and ensuring encounters are mutually meaningful and beneficial for both participants and facilitators. To begin with a simple definition, a Learning Community a Learning Community is a group of people brought together by a shared interest in a particular issue, challenge, or opportunity. Learning Community can offer a dynamic, evolving space for mutual learning, collective inquiry, and collaborative action. Depending on the topic of inquiry, members might include researchers, community members, civil society organisations, farmers, educators, business representatives, policy actors, and local authorities. The recommended group size is 8 to 12 members. Members are not only connected by a single identity, but a shared commitment to deepening understanding and shaping more inclusive responses to complex issues.
Learning Community might be known by other names - for example, communities of practice, learning networks - but can be understood to have similar guiding principles:
- Learning Community generate value through relationships, trust, and shared purpose. By bringing people together with different perspectives and experiences, they foster meaningful connections that sustain long-term engagement.
- Learning Community support the sharing, testing, and challenging of knowledge. Rather than transferring expertise from one group to another, they create the conditions for diverse forms of knowledge to be exchanged, refined, and applied in practice.
- Learning Community are grounded in co-creation. They enable collaborative thinking and doing, supporting the development of more grounded, inclusive, and adaptive responses to complex challenges.
- Learning Community centre on real-world problems and context-specific challenges. Whether rooted in a particular place, focused on a specific method, or shaped by a policy concern, they offer space for people to engage with issues that matter to them and their communities.
- Learning Community build collective understanding through action. Members learn by working on shared questions, designing and testing interventions, and reflecting on what works and why.
- Learning Community evolve over time. Participation is shaped by relevance, trust, and shared commitment, with new pathways for collaboration and change emerging as understanding deepens.
In this video from the Urban Youth Learning Community, group members share reflections on what it means to be part of a Learning Community and what can be achieved through collective action and collaboration:
Leaning Communities in PLANET4B
The PLANET4B project used Learning Community as a central strategy to support more inclusive, reflective, and situated forms of engagement with biodiversity decision-making. Each PLANET4B Learning Community was connected in a specific place and shaped by the questions, needs, and dynamics of that context. The Learning Community addressed one or more intersectional dimension of biodiversity governance and decision-making, including such as gender, religion, ethnicity, race, age, culture, and disability. In total there were six Learning Community:
BeGraz Edible City Learning Community - Graz, Austria
This Learning Community worked to link urban gardening, food policy, and biodiversity. It brought together city officials, grassroots groups, educators, and farmers to co-design an edible park, creating a platform for policy dialogue and community participation around urban biodiversity.
- DADIMA’s Opening nature to Black, Asian and Ethnic Minority Communities - Chilterns, United Kingdom
This Learning Community was developed in collaboration with the Dadima’s walking group, which brings together members from diverse cultural and generational backgrounds to explore countryside access and nature connection. The group used a range of creative and deliberative methods, including such as participatory film and biodiversity games to reflect on cultural relationships with land, challenge exclusionary rural norms, and generate collective knowledge about biodiversity through walking and shared storytelling. - Urban Youth Intersectionality, and Nature - Germany
This Learning Community, brought together young people aged 22 to 27 from diverse ethnic, religious, and socio-economic backgrounds, including migrants and students. Through forest expeditions, creative workshops, and behavioural games, the group explored how youth — particularly those with less privilege — can influence biodiversity decision-making and become empowered environmental actors. - Enabling Intersectional Nature recreation and Biodiversity Stewardship for Urban Resilience - Oslo, Norway
This Learning Community focused on inclusive access to nature for young people with acquired disabilities. Centred around peer mentors with lived experience, the group explored barriers to participation and opportunities for expanding support systems. Co-developed goals included scaling mentoring programmes and improving public information on accessible recreational activities to promote urban resilience and biodiversity stewardship.
- Swiss Attitudes Towards Agriculture Biodiversity - Switzerland
This Learning Community explored how farmers’ religious and moral beliefs shape their attitudes towards agriculture and biodiversity. Through interviews, storytelling, and visual methods, participants reflected on the ethical foundations of their land practices and the ways in which spiritual or cultural values influence everyday decisions. The process aimed to make biodiversity a more visible concern in farming mindsets and practices, while also creating space for dialogue on the moral dimensions of environmental care. Insights from the project contributed to broader discussions on how value systems can support more ecologically attentive and culturally grounded agricultural policies.
In the PLANET4B project, Learning Community helped:
- Build trust and relationships among actors who might not otherwise collaborate
- Create space for people to explore important local biodiversity issues together, based on what matters to them and their communities
- Support members to think about their own role, background, and values, and how these shape the way they see and approach environmental issues
- Try out creative ways of working that help include people who are often left out of decision-making
- Connect everyday knowledge and personal experience to policy conversations, in ways that are grounded, relevant, and lead to practical action
- Trial and develop creative, engaging, participatory methods such as serious games, storytelling and theatre
