Green Mentor was a two year European Commission project, funded under the Erasmus+ programme (2015-2017). While mentoring is an established business practice, particularly in the entrepreneurial start-up area, mentoring to green entrepreneurs, who wish to incorporate environmental values into their businesses is a new and growing reality in Europe.

The five partner organisations for Green Mentor were:

• Utopicus Innovacion Cultural S.L., Spain (Lead);
• INFODEF Instituto para el Fomento del Desarrollo y la Formación S.L., Spain;
• Cork Institute of Technology (Hincks Centre for Entrepreneurship Excellence), Ireland;
• BGE Budapest Business School, Hungary and 
• BEST Institut für Berufsbezogene Weiterbildung und Personaltraining GmbH, Austria

The Hincks Centre, within CIT, were responsible for developing one of the key project outputs, namely, the Green Mentor Handbook.

Other key project outputs included a draft curriculum for forming the basis for seeking certification of a green mentoring curriculum under existing European Vocational Educational Frameworks and a Green Mentor Toolkit containing useful tools designed to guide the mentor and mentee along the green mentoring journey.

The Green Mentor project sought to define and support the new emerging professional role of Green Mentor, i.e. those who mentor and provide practical support to entrepreneurs in starting up a green business or in greening an existing business by the introduction of green or eco-friendly processes and practices.  Development of the green economy offers great potential for opportunities for green entrepreneurs and for sustainable future jobs. Further information about the project, the project partners and the materials produced and tested as part of the project are available on the project website http://greenmentor-project.eu/

The highlights of this project that align with SDG 12 are reviewed in the Hincks Blog “Training Business Mentors for the Circular Economy". The article can be viewed in the Blogs section of our website by clicking here.