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From idea to enterprise
Start date: Aug 1, 2015, End date: Feb 29, 2016 PROJECT  FINISHED 

The changes in the world economy and technologies together with globalisation and society development strongly influence on a labour market. There is no anymore “job for life”, the industrial and physical work is becoming less needed giving the way to creativity-focused professions and due to high competition in business sector and economic problems employers are looking for already educated, experienced, flexible and creative employees. In turn it influences on the youth unemployment. At this stage entrepreneurship and in particular social entrepreneurship can become an effective way to confront the problem. It is how young people can get needed experience, become responsible and create their own jobs. NGOs can help young people to develop employability skills and involve them into entrepreneurship. At the same time NGOs also can benefit a lot from learning social entrepreneurship as they also face with the different problems and cannot be sustainable. But there are not many NGOs which are competitive enough in the issue. The training course “From idea to enterprise” aimed to develop youth workers skills on creativity and social entrepreneurship in order to make NGOs sustainable and involve young people in the process of overcoming the youth unemployment through social entrepreneurship. The project brought together 24 youth workers and young people from 11 Program and Neighboring countries. The majority of the participants were familiar with the project topic and had social entrepreneurship ideas. The objectives of the training course were: 1) To develop entrepreneurial skills of the participants. 2) To provide the participants with information on how to develop, validate and implement social entrepreneurial projects and enterprises. 3) To explore practical ways of supporting NGOs set up social enterprises, taking into consideration legal, financial, management and social requirements. 4) To equip the participants with tools and methods on development entrepreneurial skills among young people. 5) To develop new methods and tools on the topic of social entrepreneurship. 6) To provide the participants with the opportunity to exchange experience and expertise in the field of social entrepreneurship. 7) To provide the participants with information about opportunities of the Erasmus+ Programme and to support establishment of new partnerships, especially with Eastern Partnership countries. 8) To develop solidarity, promote tolerance and foster mutual understanding between people with different backgrounds through initiating intercultural dialogue between them and common transnational projects. The type of the activity was a training course, that was based on using the non-formal education methods and specific methods and tools on the project topic. The project consisted from 2 activities. The first activity was concentrated on understanding of issue entrepreneurship (in particular social entrepreneurship), creation and development of social enterprises’ ideas, funding opportunities, some of the employability and entrepreneurial skills (leadership skills, communication skills, presentation skills, innovation and creativity, critical thinking skills) and financial management. In the beginning of the training course the participants were divided in small groups of 3 persons in each. They worked on creating of social enterprises: from the idea to the first steps of running the social business. During the activities people in the groups were changing depending on the tasks. The second activity took place at the participants’ home countries. They worked under the trainers’ mentoring on improving their ideas, analyse of the markets needs and sectors, potential difficulties, list of means for opening the enterprise and plan for the first year. The main results of the project is opening of new enterprises (including social enterprises) independently or on the NGOs' base and activities for young people on the topic of social entrepreneurship implemented by project participants in their countries. Promoting social entrepreneurship among the local partners’ NGO in order to help them to become sustainable as well as involvement of bigger number of young people in to NGO and social entrepreneurship issue are longer term benefits after the project.
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