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Recycling for the Community
Recycling for the Community
Start date: Aug 1, 2016,
End date: Jan 31, 2017
PROJECT
FINISHED
Our project Recycling for the Community is a Youth Exchange implemented by partner organisations from Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey. The idea of the project appeared after the participantion of the representatives of the partner organisations in the training course ATOQ organized in May 2015 in Czech Republic. Then, Cristina, Snezhana and Serpil identified the needs to train the young people from their countries to become more aware about sustainable development and environment problems at European level, to stimulate their creativity while promoting an eco friendly behaviour, to stimulate their creative thinking by working on an eco friendly business idea and thus develop entrepreneurial skills and rise the emplyability changes. These needs became the main objectives of our project and their relevance was reinforced by the official figures we found regarding the waste of paper and plastic at European and even international level and the high levels of pollution determined by this unecological behaviour. Taking all these needs that became objectives of our project into account, we designed a 10 days programme of activities for a youth exchange that will gather together 24 young people aged between 13 and 30 and 6 team leaders from the Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey. It is importance to mention, that in order to promote tolerance and solidarity as well as equity and inclusion, we will select 8 young people with fewer opportunities (educational, economical, geographical and social). The activities include team building moments and discovering of the host country and the host town, presentations of the partner countries, their cultures and customs, religion, weather conditions, familiarization with the cultures and development of acceptance and tolerance by organising a gastronomic seminar and a presentation of traditional costumes, dances and music. Then, the programme continues with 6 days of creative recycling workshops. We established to carry out these workshops in three rural areas from Bistrita Nasaud county in partnership with the schools, as the students who study there usually have different social, economical or educational problems. In addition to that, most of them come from Roma families and lack ecological education, or worse have an inappropriate behaviour regarding the throwing of waste (usually on the bank of the rivers), not to mention the lack of recycling habits. Thus, by involving our participants in educating the students and local community to recycle creatively and develop eco friendly beahaviour, we will achieve another objective of the present project, namety to promote the active citizenship of our participants. Last but not least, our project focuses on developing the entrepreneurial skills of the participants by offering them a basic training in the field of entrepreneurship and stimulating them to work in group and propose eco friendly business ideas. A method used to materialize their business plans and put them in the shoes of entrepreneurs will be to train them to create and manage an online shop. This will be done by a specialized company. Managing the online shop will be an activity that will continue in the dissemination phase too and if the partners agree it can continue even after the end of the project. This will make our project more sustainable and it will definitely create a great impact al local, national, European and even international level as through the power of the Internet people form different corners of the world can be reached. The online shop will be used to promote the creative products made by the participants during the recycling workshops organised both in the implementation phase by all the participants and students of the school and in the dissemination period by the Turkish and Bulgarian participants. Asociatia Tineri pentru Comunitate will be legally entitled to sell the products and it will also have the obligation to keep the partners informed about the profit. However, the participants will also be able and in fact asked to keep the record of profits and losses, too. Based on a written agreement, all the money raised on the online shop will be used for ecological activities in the partner countries both during and after the present project. We consider this the most important final results with a great impact on the participants as will help them genuinely develop entrepreneurial skills (in comparison to a business plan proposal that will remain on a piece of paper or on a website or facebook page), on the participanting organisations as it will consolidate their cooperation and it can even bring them funds to carry out other eco friendly projects and also on the target groups (students, teacher and members of the local communities of the partner countries) who might follow our example. There are other final products we consider that can produce impact: a video, a photo album and a facebook page.