How this page works

1. Find your field below — or the one closest to it.
2. Take the cooperation idea as written, or bend it to your project. Every idea is a starting point, not a fixed offer.
3. Write one paragraph about your project to erasmus@evec.org.gr — we reply with three concrete ways the microgreens methodology can add value to it. That is a standing promise, and it costs you five minutes.

VET — hooks by vocation

Vocational education is where the methodology is most literal: one growing cycle is a complete work-based learning unit — sow, grow, harvest, cost, price, sell — in 7 to 14 days, on a classroom budget. Whatever trade you teach, the tray has a job for it.

Cooks & culinary arts

Your students plate garnishes they harvested that morning. Menu development with a living ingredient, plate-cost calculations on a crop they grew themselves, flavour work across 29 varieties from pea shoots to shiso — and a tested open cookbook to start from. Cooperation idea: a joint “from tray to plate” module — your students grow three crops, develop three dishes each, and publish them in the cookbook with their names on them.

Food technology & food safety

A crop with a shelf life measured in days is the perfect teaching product: hygiene, washing, storage temperature, labelling and spoilage become visible within one school week, not one semester. Cooperation idea: co-develop the food-handling unit of our 10-Day Growing Guide with your specialists — your class pilots it, both names go on the final open resource.

Agriculture & horticulture

The direct hook: soilless systems, germination rates, substrate comparisons and yield data — fast enough that students run several full trials per term, indoors, in any season. Cooperation idea: comparative growing trials between partner schools in different countries, same seed, different conditions, results published in the open Varieties database.

Business, management & economics

A micro-enterprise with a ten-day cash cycle: seed cost in, revenue out, margin visible before the month ends. Costing, pricing, customer discovery and pitching — with a free bootcamp course already live to build on. Cooperation idea: international student companies grow the same crop in different markets and compare unit economics across countries — a business lesson no textbook can print.

Marketing, sales & design

Branding a real product beats branding an imaginary one: naming, label design, product photography and social content for a living tray of greens, with real customers reacting. Cooperation idea: a multi-country student branding challenge — the winning identity is actually used by the microgreens cooperative in Athens.

Electronics, IT & data

A tray is a bio-lab for IoT: humidity, temperature and light sensors, timelapse rigs, growth dashboards — code meets a living system that punishes bad data within days. Our hydroponics-and-sensors toolkit draft is the starting point. Cooperation idea: your students build and program the monitoring kit, learners in Athens grow with it, and both sides publish the shared dataset openly.

Logistics & retail

A product that lives for days, not months, turns supply-chain theory into a stopwatch problem: harvest windows, cold chain, stock rotation and last-mile delivery to restaurants. Cooperation idea: a delivery-challenge unit where student teams plan and cost the route from tray to table before the crop wilts.

Tourism & hospitality

Farm-to-table is a story guests pay for — and a growing shelf in the breakfast room is the smallest farm that can tell it. Cooperation idea: pilot a “living kitchen garden” guest experience: students design it, run it and script the storytelling around it.

Health & care professions

Nutrition education with sources you can check: our Science Library rewrites peer-reviewed microgreens research in plain language, linking every original study. Cooperation idea: your students co-create plain-language nutrition materials for patients or older adults, reviewed against the library and published openly.

Construction, wood & metal work

Somebody has to build the farm: growing racks, light frames, irrigation trays — real workshop products with a daily user waiting for them. Cooperation idea: your workshop designs and builds a growing wall; the methodology fills it with life; the build plans join the open toolkits so any school can copy it.

Youth work — hooks by theme

Youth projects are rarely about a subject — they are about a group. That is exactly where a tray of living greens earns its place: it gives any group, whatever brought it together, a shared thing to care for that visibly responds within days.

Bullying prevention & group dynamics

A tray fails if the group fails it. Shared care for a living thing gives a group a common project where cooperation — and its absence — becomes visible in days, without anyone being singled out. The harvest meal at the end is a ritual the whole group earned together. Cooperation idea: co-design a 10-day group-building cycle where the crop’s progress mirrors the group’s, with your youth workers shaping the reflection sessions.

Migrants, refugees & integration

Sowing needs no vocabulary. On day one everyone plants the same seed; by harvest, the group is sharing recipes from every kitchen it came from. Food is the one language nobody has to learn. Cooperation idea: intercultural harvest dinners as a recurring format, and a recipe chapter from your community published in the open cookbook.

LGBTQ+ inclusion & safe spaces

A garden takes no sides. Growing together is a neutral, hands-on activity where belonging forms around the work itself, not around labels — and the shared table at harvest is a safe-space format that needs no explaining. Cooperation idea: build your safe-space programme around a growing cycle, with the methodology carrying the structure and your organisation carrying the community expertise.

NEETs & employability

For a young person whom school failed, the first win matters most — and this one arrives in seven days, green and edible and undeniable. Then come costing, selling and a portfolio: the bootcamp course is free, and the growing space in Athens costs nothing to use. Cooperation idea: an employability strand where every participant leaves with a harvested crop, a costed business sheet and a published contribution.

Mental health & wellbeing

Daily watering is structure; visible growth is feedback; harvest is completion. A growing routine offers green care without clinical framing — nobody is a patient at a growing bench. Cooperation idea: co-design a wellbeing cycle with your psychologists or youth workers, where the methodology provides the rhythm and your team provides the support around it.

Disability & special educational needs

Growing at table height: no field, no heavy tools, no weather. Tasks scale from scattering seeds to managing a sensor dashboard, so every participant works at their own edge — and every sense gets something to do. Cooperation idea: adapt one of our open toolkits into an accessible version with your specialists, published openly as its own result.

Climate, environment & green transition

The green transition on a windowsill: soilless growing that uses up to 90% less water, zero food miles, waste you can weigh — and data young people collect themselves instead of reading about. Cooperation idea: a youth exchange where every group grows, measures and presents its own sustainability numbers, feeding a shared open dataset.

Participation & democracy

The tray as a miniature parliament: the group decides what to grow, how to price it and what happens to the proceeds — cooperative governance small enough to practise and real enough to sting. Cooperation idea: a decision-making curriculum wrapped around a growing cycle, tested against the real cooperative model running in Athens.

Schools, adult education and research

Schools: one tray crosses the curriculum — germination in biology, yield and price in maths, nutrients in chemistry, a recipe written in the foreign language, a label designed in art. The schools page and two classroom toolkits carry the detail. Adult education: nutrition and healthy ageing, family learning, numeracy through real costing, integration courses where language practice happens over a shared harvest — see microgreens in adult education. Researchers: households growing the same crop and reporting their data is citizen science waiting to happen — see the Horizon Europe page.

Your field is not on this page?

Even better — it means the hook for your project has not been written yet, and writing it together is the most natural way to start a partnership. The pattern is always the same: your topic + microgreens = a hands-on activity your participants will remember, and a concrete, fundable added value in your application. Hairdressing academies, driving schools, choirs — we have yet to meet the field where the pattern fails.

One paragraph about your project to erasmus@evec.org.gr. Three concrete ideas back. That is the deal.