The Catalan Association of Public Universities (ACUP) and Justinmind took part in the III Symposium on Environmental Service-Learning and Community Service, held on Thursday, July 3, 2025, at the Centre Cultural de Bellvitge-Gornal in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat. The event gathered over 200 participants from diverse organisations, educational institutions, and local authorities.

Specifically, project partners engaged in the Symposium’s “Seeking and Offering” space, a networking area designed to connect organisations and institutions involved in service-learning and community service initiatives. This space showcased more than 20 projects organised into three thematic areas.

As part of the LOESS university campaign in Catalonia, ACUP and Justinmind presented an overview of the project’s results and outlined plans to collaborate with university faculty to integrate community engagement into soil health research and learning. 

In particular, they introduced a four-step process, set to launch this autumn, to promote and deploy a science shop approach, linking it with service-learning and citizen science methodologies. This process will involve leveraging a crowd-mapping tool to identify local soil health challenges, delivering the training module “From a problem to a research question”, launching ten CERL projects, and promoting training modules devised for students by students, including a shared competency map, in ten or more universities.

The symposium’s theme, “We Learn, We Commit. Do We Transform?”, invited reflection on the impact of service-learning on participants and their communities, with a special emphasis on students’ experiences and whether service-learning fosters meaningful change within educational environments.

This third edition further strengthened the symposium’s position as a key platform advocating environmental service-learning projects as tools for education and social transformation, as well as a space for exchange and collaboration among relevant stakeholders.

The organising committee of the Symposium included the Government of Catalonia, Barcelona Provincial Council, Barcelona City Council, Metropolitan Area of Barcelona (AMB), Catalan Society for Environmental Education (SCEA), Service Learning, L’Hospitalet de Llobregat City Council, Network of Schools for Sustainability in Catalonia (XESC), and the Official Association of Pedagogues of Catalonia.