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Young and Enterprising
Young and Enterprising
Start date: Feb 1, 2016,
End date: Aug 31, 2016
PROJECT
FINISHED
Gloucestershire Mentoring and Support CiC from Cheltenham (UK) is applying to host groups of young people from Gottingen (Germany), Pau (France) and Torun (Poland) to explore entrepreneurship for young European citizens. For a week in the summer of 2016 groups of 8 young people, accompanied by two leaders, will spend a week staying in Cheltenham. Each day we will explore a different aspect of setting up or working in a small to medium business, with practical tasks; visits to examples of good businesses; workshops; and much more. We will look at coming up with an idea for a business, marketing, ethics in business and sales which will culminate in four different, multi-national "businesses" coming up with a live business plan for a presentation on the final morning.The purpose of this project is to teach young people practical skills so they can set up or work in small to medium enterprises; develop their linguistic skills and ability to work with young people from different linguistic backgrounds; to better understand intercultural issues and how to work with people from different cultural backgrounds; and to increase the awareness and understanding of multi-national work for young people, schools and youth agencies in the partner countries.The week will start with some inter-cultural awareness and linguistic activities and, of course, some ice breaking and team building activities. We will then set up four multi-national "businesses", splitting the young people form different nations into joint teams. From here we will run through daily tasks in a variety of methods. We will explore marketing through a video and graphic design work shop; we will think about product/service design by visiting a successful local and pan-European business to see their product deisgn in action; we will explore ethics in business by visiting a business for adults with learning difficulties and also thinking about the local, unethical history of the slave trade and its heritage at Gloucester Docks. We will do outdoor games in our leisure time to encourage informal sharing of culture and language. Each "business" will also be tasked, in turn, to market and publicise the work we are doing during the training week for a day each, so we expect social media, local traditional media and local residents to be made aware of this project in ingenious and creative ways!The young people taking part will be aged 15-18 and will be chosen and prepared by the four partner agencies. We intend for this project to impact positively all the young people taking part as they strive to enter the labour market. They may set up their own businesses, they may work in other businesses, they may end up working in big business! But the skills they learn will be transferable whatever their next step. And long term we want to push the idea of entrepreneurship (especially in social causes) to the forefront of young people's, youth worker's, schools and youth agency's minds.