Environmental Heritage and Generations – Winners

The First T4EU Sustainable Heritage Student Competition was held in Trieste, Italy, from 7 to 11 July 2025, bringing together students from across the alliance for a week of collaborative learning and innovation. Hosted by the University of Trieste in partnership with the Bora Museum (Museo della Bora) and the Innovators Community Lab (ICL – UNITS), the competition was organised in the framework of a Blended Intensive Programme (BIP).

This inaugural edition focused on the theme Environmental Heritage and Generations. The theme emphasised the intersection of environmental, atmospheric, landscape, and climatic heritage with the perspective of intergenerational exchange. Students were challenged to develop cultural projects that could both engage communities and raise awareness about climate change, while preserving and promoting intergenerational knowledge and experiences.

Participants worked in international teams to design innovative, locally grounded, and globally relevant projects. The submitted proposals were:

• Not Gone With the Wind. Fostering Intergenerational Dialogue to Protect Cultural Heritage and Planet by Libeccio Team (Palina Salei, Siyana Boseva, Sofia Yacovleva, Ulrich Koko, Maria Sikora)
• Bright Future of Trieste by Maestrale Team (Tetiana Koroi, Petya Kayryakova, Andrian Vasilev, Grzegorz Lupa, Konrad Pietrzyk)
• 4ElemenTS by Scirocco Team (Thales Reis Alecrim, Yanitsa Ivanova, Julia Gazur, Ina Vasileva)
• Winds of Changes by Zefiro Team (Anastasiia Puha, Gabriela Stefanova, Simona Todorova, Bernardo Marques, Adam Wiśniowski).

After careful evaluation by a multidisciplinary jury, the winning project stood out for:

• The strong teamwork and deep cooperation among team members, the solid grounding in local territories, and the ability to integrate skills, knowledge, and experience at a European and international level.
• Having developed a complete and well-detailed project.
• The intertwining of local interpretation and interdisciplinarity.
• The project’s scalability and replicability, and the originality in engaging multiple generations, local communities, as well as existing institutions, and weaving them into a meaningful network.
• The focus on sustainability and the now essential interconnection between environmental and cultural components — an approach rooted in climate justice, which remains a key factor in addressing today’s challenges.
• The transparency in the team’s work and the fair play shown in welcoming constructive criticism to improve the project further.
• Being an undoubtedly ambitious initiative. Given the challenges of our time, it is essential to aim high—starting from individual examples—while remaining pragmatically grounded in the local context and its possibilities.

  The winner of this challenge is: Scirocco Team with the project 4ElemenTS.

  We warmly congratulate all the teams for their creativity, commitment, and inspiring vision.
  We are proud to state that the competition not only showcased the talent and dedication of T4EU students, but also strengthened our shared mission to preserve and promote sustainable heritage through collaborative, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational efforts.