About

From a European to a local level, social enterprise is recognised as making a valuable contributed to building social cohesion/wellbeing and economic growth. 2018 was designated the European Year of Cultural Heritage, highlighting the value of keeping the traditions found across Europe alive and ensuring enriched communities. The project contributed to both of these key aims and has been structured to ensure the results can be replicated in full or part, both within and beyond the partner countries.

Keeping Traditions Alive through Social Enterprise – The project has been designed to:

– pass traditional craft skills from older people with skills and knowledge to young people;

– teach the young people on the principles and practical steps to setting up a social enterprise; – support young people to use the craft skills and social enterprise knowledge to make and market craft goods.

This process was achieved through developing and piloting two courses, one entitled “Intergenerational Traditional Craft Sharing” and the other entitled “Develop My Social Enterprise.” Each course embeds the principles of learning by doing /non-formal learning and link to young people building their competences as outlined in the Youthpass
Certification.

This two year project started on September 30th, 2019.

A short course for trainers & blended mobilities for young people was held during the project.

All partners sent one staff member to joint-staff training course in Hemel Hempstead (UK). The individuals who attended had responsibility for delivery of Social Enterprise learning course to eight young people in their locality.

The first Blended Youth Mobility took place in Merthyr Tydfil (UK). The two young people per country met with their sending partner to discuss the learning in O3 and how it could be used to improve O4 delivery. It included a dimension of team building exercises alongside the project learning activities, while the latter included visits to traditional crafts and local markets. The blended mobility was physical – attendance in person by participants in UK and participating in the planned activities and virtual – through sharing the traditional craft skill videos prior and participating prior and after through social media networks.

The second Blended Youth Mobility took place in Romania. Two young people per country and partner trainer discussed their experiences and shared what worked well and what could have been better in O4 pilot of the Social Enterprise course developed in O3. The places for this course were allocated as recognition of achievement by the young person. We used non-formal learning methods to maximise the learning shared from project participation and provided opportunity to create additional content for the project outputs.

Country level Multiplier Events raised awareness / contributed to dissemination.

Using social enterprise as youth work tool & sharing traditions was achieved at national level. Research on social entrepreneurship was used as tool for transnational learning and good practice transfer, specially from countries where it is well developed towards the other countries.

The partners of the Project: