Developing Opportunities for Volunteers to become social Entrepreneurs Erasmus Project

Project Title

Developing Opportunities for Volunteers to become social Entrepreneurs

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Capacity Building for youth in ACP countries, Latin America and Asia

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2016

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Enterprise, industry and SMEs (incl. entrepreneurship)

Project Summary

“The bare fields, the empty roads, the ruined houses and the shuttered schools say it all. Welcome to Bulgaria’s rural northwest, officially the poorest region in the European Union.” The situation was not different in other European regions. In January 2015 the European Commission published a paper “Addressing youth unemployment in the EU” with the following main findings:-More than 5 million young people aged 15-24 were unemployed in the EU.-This represented an unemployment rate of 21.9% (23.7% in the euro area). This meant that more than one in five young Europeans on the labour market could not find a job. In Greece and Spain, it was even one in two.-More than 33% of unemployed people under 25 had been unemployed for more than a year in 2013.-7.5 million young Europeans between 15 and 24 were not employed, not in education and not in training (NEETs).-The young were at much greater risk in terms of precariousness and had been disproportionately hit by the crisis. In light of the potential of entrepreneurs to create employment and sustainable growth, promoting youth entrepreneurship and making Europe more entrepreneur‑friendly has recently become a priority on the EU policy agenda. However, research has shown that among young people the wish to become an entrepreneur, and their assessment of its feasibility, is lower in EU Member States than in comparable and emerging economies. Encouraging entrepreneurship is recognized at European level as particularly important to face challenges related to alarmingly high youth unemployment rates in most of the EU Member States. Entrepreneurship and self-employment are important pathways for young people to emerge from unemployment. In economically struggling regions, the social entrepreneurship model, which is close to people and to local communities, and primarily aimed at contributing to the general good of society, is the answer. Fostering the right mind-set and entrepreneurship skills, as per the Europe 2020 strategy, can advance a European entrepreneurial culture in the young people, especially in the least developed EU regions, such as the participating ones from Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. DOVE targeted youth unemployment by developing the Social Idea Stream (SIS) – a platform for young people to collaborate in the design and implementation of social entrepreneurship activities. SIS aligned the project partners’ experience with the 2015 recommendation of the European Economic and Social Committee: “Entrepreneurship education needs to be considered, however, in the context of the overall social – and not just business – environment”.DOVE fitted within the objectives of the partner organisations and their countries as it built opportunities for young people to escape the unemployment vicious circle and to enter economic activity with social dimension.The cornerstone of developing of the DOVE project was to identify problems, faced commonly by young people from the partner organizations, and to develop and deliver suitable solutions. We focused on youth empowerment concept which will give the project the freedom to try novel approaches and test their transferability into the different partners’ cultural environments.In preparing the project proposal, the partners worked through several stages:1. Establish cooperation routine between the project partners’ innovation managers and youth work experts.2. Identify common issues and needs by the partners’ target group of young people.3. Identify ways for the project partners’ innovation managers and youth work experts to engage with the partners’ target group of young people.4. Develop and assess a modern concepts of intervention that can be delivered efficiently, recognising the personal needs, skills and abilities of the young people.5. Provide a pathway for external people and related organisations to help the target group engage with social entrepreneurship.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 150000 Eur

Project Coordinator

ASOCIATIA KLEBELSBERG KUNO & Country: RO

Project Partners

• NARODNO CHITALISHTE SVETAL DEN 2009
• MINU ASOCIACION CIVIL
• RYD WALLONIE-BRUXELLES
• DEBRECENI IFJUSAGI SZOLGALTATO NONPROFIT KORLATOLT FELELOSSEGU TARSASAG
• SHANGHAI JIN SHENG CREATIVE SERVICE CO. LTD.