Project title: One step ahead
Grant amount: 90.897,20 €
One Step Ahead is a cross-national initiative designed to promote social entrepreneurship as a way for empowering youth at risk. Our aim is to increase professional capacities of participating NGOs by developing and giving them access to educational tools and methodological approaches allowing them to open up social enterprises that would contribute to sustainable development of their local communities.
One of the main reasons this project was developed is the need to go deeper into exploring connections between promoting entrepreneurial activities and empowering young people with fewer opportunities. The above mentioned need is strongly rooted in the context of contemporary Europe. Both governmental and non-governmental institutions try to come up with effective solutions to help the unprecedented number of young people permanently excluded from the labour market. One of the most efficient strategies is empowering youngsters to create their own work places, hence we find it crucial to promote entrepreneurial education.
The main aim of this proposal is to promote social entrepreneurship as a way for empowering young people with fewer opportunities and preventing them from permanent social exclusion and permanent unemployment.
The specific objectives of this project were based on throughout research of the needs of participating organizations and future target groups and defined as follows:
1. Raising the capacities of NGOs and youth workersas for promoting SE as a way of empowering youth with fewer opportunities (young unemployed, members of groups subjected to discrimination such as national/ethnic/religious minorities, refugees and migrants, people with disabilities, people from geographically disadvantaged areas etc.)
2. Exploring new educational approacheson the topic and developing, testing and disseminating innovative educational curricula (in a form of a ready-to-use tool box) on how to teach social entrepreneurship to young people that can be used in both formal and non-formal educational settings
3. Giving youth workers and young people practical toolsas well as long-term structured support and mentoring to enable them to plan, open and run social enterprises that bring sustainable and long term impact to the local communities they work in
4. Planning up at least social entrepreneurshiprun by young people per participating country
5. Exchanging best practices and creating a sustainable network of European SE promoters who focus on empowering young people through equipping them with entrepreneurial skills
6. Promoting SE on cross-sectoral level,especially through developing policy recommendations to be delivered to relevant stakeholders