The LOLA Vision is articulated on four major points:

• FOCUS ON LOCAL SCALE: LOLA aims at looking for promising sustainable initiatives at a walking distance from the school…

• ADOPT ACTION LEARNING: LOLA is an investigation process based on interviews. It doesn’t require particular knowledge or preparation…

• ACT NOW: radical change doesn’t come only from top-down policies…

• CHANGE WAYS OF LIVING: LOLA proposes to search for new sustainable way of living…

Here are some promising initiatives:

FOCUS ON THE  LOCAL SCALE:
Sustainability issues relate to abstract systems, complex interactions and big numbers… How to get children (and adults) feel concerned about carbon emissions, water shortages, acid rains, etc?  Especially how to make them understand the relationship between one’s behaviours and the negative or positive impacts of them on the global scale? LOLA proposes to focus on the local context: what is happening in the street nearby? What did neighbours implement to reduce their impact on the environment? What actions are efficient and have been successfully adapted in the area we live in? etc. LOLA aims at looking for promising sustainable initiatives at a walking distance from the school; to search for people or groups of people who invent new solutions in their daily living that is likely to reduce their impact on the environment and to regenerate the social fabric around; to raise awareness and concerns with close and concrete examples…
ADOPT ACTION LEARNING:
Deciding (and teaching) sustainability issues requires specific knowledge and background that is progressively shaping and slowly diffusing among the population. Sustainability triggers contradictory interests and lots of distorted and fault information. To make one personal point of view at it on the planet scale, is challenging for all (for teachers and educational staff as well…)
LOLA is an investigation process based on interviews. It doesn’t require particular knowledge or preparation for the teacher: they will learn together asking questions; collecting material; wondering why and how the initiative they are investigating may have less or more impact on the environment; etc… They will compare points of view, come back to the class having built their own local temporary knowledge. They will have learned to live in a fussy and evolving environment and to permanently question it…
ACT NOW:
The sustainability crisis is not anymore a question of a long time: damages; degradation; pollution… It is sensitive issue in our everyday life and has become complicated by the present financial and economic crisis. Our small blue planet is dramatically requiring new regulations, reforms and paradigms. But radical change doesn’t come only from top-down policies…
LOLA proposes to focus on bottom-up initiatives. Initiatives, that don’t require any political decision or change at a global level before they can be implemented. Initiatives that can be implemented by a small group of people, creative and industrious enough to invent and introduce new and more sustainable ways of living in their everyday…
CHANGE WAYS OF LIVING:
Effort towards sustainability tends first to reduce our impact on the environment improving current solutions: they try to provide the same with less: the same products and services consuming less energy, less water, generating less pollution, etc. but this strategy has clear limits at the world scale: the western way of living cannot be generalised to the all world population without conducting to a short term catastrophe!
LOLA therefore proposes to search for new sustainable way of living where “sustainable ways of living stands for daily life activities where people and communities succeeds in living better reducing their ecological footprint and increasing the quality of the social fabric”.