ACCTING aims to understand the impact of Green Deal policies on vulnerable groups, prevent inequalities, and produce knowledge and innovations to advance behavioural change at individual and collective levels for an inclusive and equal European Green Deal. Read our report on all 693 mapped initiatives.

Pedalling Towards a Sustainable Future 

Cyclonomia is a participative bicycle repair workshop that has been running in Budapest since 2013. As a social cooperative, it provides an open space where people can repair their bicycles with the help of shared tools and advice, not direct repairs. The cooperative promotes the values of degrowth by organising training workshops and awareness-raising events, building a community centred around sustainable practices. 

Building a Community of Change 
Cyclonomia serves people in Budapest who rely on bicycles for their livelihood but may lack the financial resources to afford professional repair services. Its open workshop attracts 200-300 users, empowering them to learn self-repair skills. The cooperative works to create a community that embraces autonomy, self-sufficiency, and the principles of degrowth through shared knowledge and collective action. 

Impact Beyond the Workshop 
With 200-300 active members, Cyclonomia has successfully integrated bicycle repair with socio-economic awareness, focusing on degrowth and re-localisation of production systems. The cooperative’s workshops and training sessions go beyond just repairing bikes, fostering a civil platform where people actively engage in discussions on economic and political topics related to sustainability and community-driven change. Cyclonomia operates without formal funding, relying on donations, voluntary membership fees, and in-kind offers from citizens. Despite this, it has grown substantially and is now transforming into a new legal form to accommodate more people with stable financing.  

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ACCTING aims to understand the impact of Green Deal policies on vulnerable groups, prevent inequalities, and produce knowledge and innovations to advance behavioural change at individual and collective levels for an inclusive and equal European Green Deal. Read our report on all 693 mapped initiatives.

Bike fixing and community building in Hungarian bike workshops

Bike Kitchen is an initiative that establishes participatory workshops with the aim of providing interested people with an accessible and supportive environment where they can learn to fix bicycles. The initiative encourages people to work together and enables sharing of resources, such as necessary equipment. Bike Kitchen has two community workshops in Hungary: in Budapest and Szombathely, both of which were established in 2019.

A group of volunteers supports interested people with bicycle repair services. At regular intervals, trainings in different topics related to bicycle repair are held, which also aim to foster community-building. Consequently, a small but cohesive community has formed in both Budapest and Szombathely.

Who is involved?
Local authorities in Budapest, namely the district municipality, supported the establishment of the initiative. Yet, the initiative is almost exclusively financed by its volunteers. Bike Kitchen targets people who use bicycles for their livelihoods and are interested in learning to repair their own bicycles. In addition, they serve people that are interested in building a community with like-minded people.

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The impact of climate change and the capacity to mitigate its negative impacts are unevenly distributed across and within societies; it is the poorer, marginalised and vulnerable groups who are the most acutely affected. ACCTING has collected 358 narratives via individual interviews in 13 European countries to capture some of the experiences of those vulnerable groups. These narratives on inequalities in enablers and hindrances for advancing behavioural change span eight thematic research lines – each addressing an EU Green Deal policy area. Read our dataset including all 358 narratives collected.

Tünde, 62, Hungary, on self-reliance and connecting with nature

“I’m Tünde, a 62-year-old retired woman with three children and grand-children living with my retired husband in a small village in Southern Hungary. Before retirement I have been working as a cleaning lady for 32 years in the local primary school. My original profession is shoe-upper part maker but I never worked as such.

Originally, I am not from this village. When I was five, my mother pregnant with twins moved here from an Eastern Hungarian village with me and my siblings. She found a new husband and we all stayed here. First, we were outsiders in the village and they looked upon us with hatred because they felt sorry for my step-grandmother who had to give shelter to five children.

My parents were alcoholic and we were poor. My father was a really nice person, he never ever beat us, but my mother was difficult. I remember going to summer kindergartens even at the 7th grade just to get some food. We lived next to the nearby forest so from my childhood I had a good relationship with nature.

However not all my memories are good: our mother sent us at the age of 10-12 to get her wine from a neighbouring farmhouse. We had to go through the forest with my brother to get there and she also asked us to collect some firewood for heating. Imagine making your young children to walk in a dark forest for hours to get wine and steal wood!

“I think that our upbringing has made me and my five siblings what we are today. We vowed not to live the life of our parents.”

We all live in this village and are in a good relationship with each other. We all studied and obtained some qualifications. We all worked hard and have a good work ethic. I retired three years ago but I have not fully stopped working. We have some backyard farming with rabbits, chickens, hen and vegetables such as potatoes or garlic. I like doing all household chores by myself; I even bake my own bread. And I also help out every now and then in the local social cooperative where I collect mushrooms and other herbs for a daily rate. My husband is angry with me that I do not fully enjoy retirement but this work in nature with friends is good for me. I have had health problems with my intestines but since I am regularly helping out here, I feel much better! I like going out in nature although I prefer walking in the pasture (not in the forest). When I am collecting mushrooms and herbs alone, I prefer staying at the edge of the forest, or I will stay with my companions. I also do not know mushrooms that well – now I am learning – so I rather pick plants such as acacia, pine bud, bearberry, elderberry, linden, etc. I am usually picking berries with villagers as old as me.

Younger people do not like to work, in particular do such ‘unrewarding’ jobs in nature. There is not that much poverty in the village that they have to go out and make a living in such a way. It is really only half-wits like me who go out to nature and collect plants all the time. There is no real poverty here (yet), anyway what does this term mean? By European standards we are poor, but by local standards, where you have somewhere to live, something to eat, something to wear, something to work, somewhere to educate your children, as long as you have this…there is no real poverty.

“As I say, as long as you have something to throw out there is no poverty.”

Anyway, the village is getting older. If this generation dies out, it will be over. I admit that I have not brought my own children with me to nature when they were young thus they do not like it either. And you cannot enforce them. However, when my grandchildren visit me I ask them to put down their phones and come out with me to help in nature or around the household. I try to teach them new things, e.g. to make soup dough, knead scones, braid garlic, peel poppies, crack nuts – I taught the little one to sew with a sewing machine.”

More inspiring narratives

The impact of climate change and the capacity to mitigate its negative impacts are unevenly distributed across and within societies; it is the poorer, marginalised and vulnerable groups who are the most acutely affected. ACCTING has collected 358 narratives via individual interviews in 13 European countries to capture some of the experiences of those vulnerable groups. These narratives on inequalities in enablers and hindrances for advancing behavioural change span eight thematic research lines – each addressing an EU Green Deal policy area. Read our dataset including all 358 narratives collected.

Márta, 52, Hungary, on loving nature and living from it

“My name is Márta, a 52-year-old woman with six boys living in a 500-people village in Southern Hungary. I was born in this village and I have been living here my whole life; I was only away while studying. I am a gardener by training but I could only work in my chosen profession until my first pregnancy after which my employer, the state-owned farm got disbanded and I could not return. Afterwards I was at home for long periods with my boys and I lived from casual jobs, such as industrial factory work where I did 12-hour shifts while providing for my family.

In 2019 my life took a sudden and positive change when I got employed by a newly established social cooperative where we collect wild mushrooms and other plants and herbs from the surrounding forests lying by a nature conversation area, and process these ingredients in various ways (e.g. into cream, syrup, pesto) then sell the fresh products at markets or online, now even to fine dining restaurants in Budapest. This is a small-scale plant where we do everything manually in the collection and processing (e.g. cleaning, labelling and filling the bottles) with 2-3 other colleagues and some local daily helpers. This work is particularly benefitting for me because I have been living together with the nature since my childhood. You have to know and like the forests for this job. As I say you leave your troubles behind in the forest – it is a sort of therapy. If I do not walk ten kilometres each day then I am getting sick. Going out into the forest – this is what I like the most in this job and I also enjoy the flexibility in terms of working hours and responsibility. Otherwise, it is beneficial in financial terms since I get a full-time salary. Even when I was working in factories I always tried to come out to the forests: I was collecting mushrooms, herbs or snails alone or with my children for own consumption or for selling them to state-owned plants or private purchasers. This is quite common in this area: when there are a lot of mushrooms, anyone who can lift their legs will go to the forest and take something home.

As a rule, 2 kilograms of mushrooms can be collected by everyone without license but now the cooperative got us a license so we can collect in a specified area as much as we want. When collecting the mushrooms and herbs we are respecting the nature and the forest: we are only collecting and processing seasonal plants and mushrooms, we do not exploit the soil so our supply may vary seasonally or even weekly.

“Nowadays it is very rare, especially under 30, that someone knows which one is a ‘good’ herb and which one is a ‘bad’ plant”

Nowadays it is very rare, especially under 30, that someone knows which one is a ‘good’ herb and which one is a ‘bad’ plant while the previous generations have known all about them. It was needed since there was no plastic, shampoo or detergent and they had to solve all kinds of problems with herbs, e.g. washing, diseases.

There is no such love or respect towards nature nowadays: this is visible from the trash left behind by people such as workers in the forest. I do not say that people got worse but there is much more plastic and such trash that can be thrown away. Trash disturbs me and I always try to collect them in one place at the edge of the forest where the forest rangers can pick them up later. We tried to transfer some of our knowledge and experience by showcasing our work to local children. The smaller children were enjoying the presentation but the 7th and 8th graders were already generally uninterested.

“If children are given a choice, they will certainly not choose the forest, neither as a livelihood nor as a hobby”

If children want to see a forest, they will search for it in a computer and check it online. However, there is interest in our work and products from other people, such as chefs. Chefs from Budapest visited us once and I joked that we have just had the largest number of chefs per square metre in Hungary. On the one hand, it makes me proud that our ingredients and products are used in expensive restaurants and on the other hand I find it amusing that they are using ‘weeds’ such as purslane for their dishes. In my opinion these are war foodstuff: this is what people ate when there was nothing else left since they took the men to the front and the women had to pick these plants. I also tried to extend my knowledge and become an official mushroom inspector but once there were not enough applicants for a local training and once the training was too far away. Now I can only unofficially help people who might come to our plant to ask whether a mushroom is edible or not.

Lately they have also found oil and gas in the area and a Texas-based company got concession for its extraction. You can see 35 small flares burning the methane in the night around our forests. The Americans also came to our village and presented how the people would benefit from the oil production. Most of the people were enthusiastic but I was sceptical: what kind of jobs can you offer to local villagers even if you found oil here? They would need experts that we do not have. Honestly, I was afraid that the oil production would destroy the environment and end our forest activities. So I was relieved when they only found hot water in this village. We do not need to destroy the forest even more; the changing – drier and warmer – weather is already hurting the mushrooms anyway.”

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Photo by Klara Kulikova from Unsplash

ACCTING aims to understand the impact of Green Deal policies on vulnerable groups, prevent inequalities, and produce knowledge and innovations to advance behavioural change at individual and collective levels for an inclusive and equal European Green Deal. This bottom-up initiative was collected by Gabor Szudi within ACCTING’s mapping of inspiring practice cases, within the Farm to Fork research line. Read our report on all 693 mapped initiatives.

Kiút, Hungary

The Kiút programme is a work-integrated training program in which vulnerable Roma people with a predominantly minority background are provided with training and mentoring on how to grow cucumbers on their land and generate income by selling the surplus through companies contracted by the program maintainers. In addition to practical agricultural, entrepreneurial, and accounting skills, underserved, vulnerable people learn pro-environmental values and obtain education about sustainable food production and consumption.  

Better conditions for Roma people 

The initiative is run by a private non-profit limited company whose main shareholder is the Polgár Foundation for Opportunities, an NGO established by private persons from the business sector who strive to use their wealth to support vulnerable people through different projects.  

On-the-field training is provided by field workers trained and employed by the NGO – their responsibility is to have daily contact with the vulnerable people participating in the program and support them in each step towards establishing their own successful sustainable agricultural production, i.e. obtaining the microloan, developing the field to be used for plantation, getting the necessary materials and equipment, establishing and maintaining contact with the purchaser of the surplus food, accounting, etc.  

Raiffeisen Bank provides the participating people with a microloan of around HUF 150-200.000 (around EUR 500), which is needed to start their business. The microloan system – a model taken from the original Grameen system and adapted to Hungarian conditions – is an integral part of the program because it builds trust within the system where vulnerable people learn to take self-responsibility and overcome the so-called learned helplessness.  

Interested municipalities in Hungary’s most disadvantaged regions were found to be able and willing to work with the field workers employed by the Polgár NGO (currently 15 settlements). An adequate number of field workers were employed and trained to support the vulnerable people participating in the program. In addition to social skills, they should possess environmental, agricultural, administrative and financial knowledge.  

Environmentally sustainable and non-sustainable food values depending on culture (countries), age groups, gender, or key vulnerable groups.  

Through awareness-raising and dissemination activities, interested vulnerable people got involved in the program in 2020; due to the difficulties caused by the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, 63 producers were involved from the 15 rural settlements (the peak period was around 100 people in 2015-16). Each producer receives an innovative work-integrated training and mentoring program where pro-environmental values associated with food consumption and production are also taught with the final aim of providing vulnerable people with skills that can move them out of their deprived situation through better labour market integration.  

A promising future 

In 2020, 316 tons of cucumber were bought for more than HUF 50 million from 63 local food producers. The participating people receive an average of HUF 350,000 extra income after paying the costs for their work.  

Beyond the immediate financial added value of the program, vulnerable people participating in it gain such skills (environmental and labour market-related) that can support them in their labour market (re-)integration. Based on the data available, there are many who, after working with the program, can find a permanent job in the formal economy.  

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Photo: Novian Fazli via Canva Pro 

ACCTING aims to understand the impact of Green Deal policies on vulnerable groups, prevent inequalities, and produce knowledge and innovations to advance behavioural change at individual and collective levels for an inclusive and equal European Green Deal. This bottom-up initiative was collected by Gábor Szüdi within ACCTING’s mapping of inspiring practice cases, within the Farm to Fork Research Line. Read our report on all 693 mapped initiatives.

Banyaerdő, Hungary

The critical situation of Roma Women 

In Hungary, discrimination and economic marginalization continue to be major issue that disproportionately affects women. Additionally, as women continue to experience the harmful and violent effects of sexism, the situation for Roma women is far worse and more hopeless. Roma people have lived in and contributed to Hungary for generations, making up one of the largest  Roma groups in the EU (Marina Csikós, 2022). 

Even though the European Union has made gender equality one of its goals since 1957, most of its member states still do not treat women and men equally (European Commission, 2023).  

A regional strategy for the most vulnerable  

Banyaerdő (“Forest of the Witches”) is an exciting organisation in Dencsháza, Hungary, a village of 560 people in Baranya County. It is a network of environmentalist volunteers who assist Roma women of the rural village in selling their local produce (mostly mushrooms and berries). Through cooperation, Roma women take pioneer roles in strengthening their deprived societies and developing business skills. The volunteers help make this a zero-waste business activity. Besides, the aim is to build useful capacities which would make them more competitive in the labour market. 

Find out more here.

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