CoopStarter 2.0 Erasmus Project

Project Title

CoopStarter 2.0

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 : Strategic Partnerships for vocational education and training

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Labour market issues incl. career guidance / youth unemployment; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Entrepreneurial learning – entrepreneurship education

Project Summary

Coopstarter2.0 was designed to support cooperative entrepreneurship among young Europeans. Project partners developed a mentorship methodology to help young people implement their entrepreneurial idea while learning how to mobilise a community becoming ambassadors of the cooperative model.
This initiative stems from a former European project (Grundtvig – LLP Programme), CoopStarter, which resulted in the publication of a guidebook and the creation of a European network of cooperative mentors (CoopMentors), coordinating their respective activities around a common methodology.
To improve the reach of CoopMentors towards young people Coopstarter2.0 project involved youth organisations and a training center. This collaboration also enabled youth workers to learn about cooperative entrepreneurship providing them with new skills and knowledge to be employed in their activities.

The project mentors trained 10 young ambassadors from 5 pilot countries in 2 international mobilities with materials developed by all partners in a variety of formats. All the productions of the project are freely available to anyone interested in replicating or improving the methodology and can be downloaded from the project website at http://starter.coop.
The ambassadors engaged over 300 participants in events (live and online) designed to test the intellectual outputs while developing a cooperative entrepreneurial idea. 2 cooperatives are in the making thanks to these activities.

At European level the strategic partnership has lead to stable collaboration between EU-wide networks active in the fields of youth and cooperative enterprises. It also strengthened and intensified this collaboration at national level in the participant countries.
The methodology have already been upscaled on a global level and picked up for programs in other countries outside the original consortium of partners such as Switzerland, Colombia, Uganda, Zimbabwe, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sweden, USA and Poland.
Coopstarter2.0 has also inspired the development of Coopedia, an open source Knowledge Base designed to share resources on cooperative entrepreneurship for the youth in a distributed network over the internet.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 220928 Eur

Project Coordinator

Cooperatives Europe asbl & Country: BE

Project Partners

• Legacoop Liguria
• Kooperationen
• Social Solidarity and Regional Development Network (K.A.P.A. Network)
• Co-operative College Trust
• Promo Jeunes ASBL
• Centre des jeunes, des dirigeants, des acteurs de l’économie sociale
• ASSOCIATION DES ETATS GENERAUX DES ETUDIANTS DE L’EUROPE