Last activities are discussed in Athens, which will aim to ensure the sustainability of the resources created in the project
Nowadays, the unemployment rate among youngsters in the EU is still high, in spite of the decrease since the peak in 2013; besides, this rate is uneven, impacting specially young people from Mediterranean countries (Spain, Italy, Greece) and eastern Europa (Romania, Albania, Macedonia) where unemployment rates achieve more than 30% according to Eurostat.
To counteract this trend, social business initiatives and the promotion of cooperative enterprises supported by the EU contribute to create a profit, both for the entrepreneurs themselves, as well as for the society as a whole, through the development of values such as social wellbeing, environmental sustainability, inclusion, etc.
In addition, enterprises based on the social economy concept apply organizative structures that are different to those in the market, using participative and democratic practices, commonly associated to cooperative enterprises.
The project PlayEurope: Edugames for active citizenship, founded within the Erasmus+ programme, has played a key role in promoting the interest of young people from different countries.
The key tools have been, firstly, a Manual of Success Stories in Social Entrepreneurship, which was published on June 2018 and has reached a wide audience all throughout Europa , including entities that have integrated the stories in their training programmes to engage their users; and secondly, the Step by Step Guide to become a Social Entrepreneur, an online resource launched in November 2018 which integrates theoretical concepts and educative games to learn the essential hard and soft skills needed to start a Social Enterprise.
During the last phase, the entities promoting the project have implemented workshops in their respective countries, aimed at youngsters aged 18-35 with different backgrounds, to disseminate the developed materials and to train potential social entrepreneurs.
In this sense, the Project has highlighted the need to continue working on the capacitation of the future social entrepreneurs to provide them with the essential resources to ensure the long-term sustainability of their projects, such as financial and strategic knowledge, marketing, human resources management, to mention a few examples.
This challenge will be tackled by Kveloce I+D+I, which will keep working on the learnt lessons upon completion of Playeurope project to enable potential social entrepreneurs, paying special attention to those coming from vulnerable groups. Among other aspects, it will be crucial to provide social enterprises with adequate methodologies for impact assessment, contributing to the measurement and quantification of different dimensions, for instance, wellbeing, inclusion, civic engagement and human and economic resources earned for our society.
While impact measurement is a challenging task, we are passionate about it and have been working in a wide variety of related projects.
