There is a growing interest in adult education during the last two or three decades. It is because of many reasons but the two crucial ones seem to be: the aging process characteristic for most European countries and a rapid development of modern world bringing the necessity of continuing education and updating of professional qualifications. Traditional and formal educational systems do not seem to be adequate to the educational needs in such situation. It is especially visible when we look at this problem from the perspective of local communities and their existing educational services. Looking form the perspective of educational and developmental needs of adult and elderly people in local communities, there is a big discrepancy between their needs and the offer of the educational system. That brings the necessity of looking for new approaches to adult education.

This paper presents the project that aims at building a model adult education on the local level that can help the development of key competencies of adults and elderly people in local communities. The project named “Local Centres of Knowledge and Education” was initiated in 2017 with participation of different partners such as Universities, Local Communities and Municipalities, Associations of Municipalities, NGO’s, etc. The main aim of the project was to propose a model of adult education in local community and pilot it in different places in Poland. 15 local communities interested in piloting the proposed model were invited to take part in one-year-long project that will try to diagnose the educational needs of adults in local communities, design an educational offer and deliver it to the members of those local communities. It started in September 2017 and ended in June 2018.

This paper presents the results of that project with a special focus on the ways in which Local Centres of Knowledge and Education (LOWE) were organised and run. Four different types of local centres’ organization are described with cases of real LOWE used to illustrate the differences. Recommendations for the development of adult learning are also presented.