Project Summary

Background

There is a great problem with lack of a proper social enterpreneurship education. This field of study, and most importantly practice, is still in early stages of development in our country. Through cooperation and transnational practice exchange we plan to broaden our view of the spectrum of problems in regard of this issue. Basic needs are clear – educating tutors participating in a project, sharing experience and planning together on creating next projects of a much bigger scope.

We are applying for this project because we want to create a professional consortium that will prepare high-level training concepts for people who want to set up a social economy entity and deal in practice with social entrepreneurship. We want to prepare a specific guide. We believe that the social economy is a good form of combating social exclusion. Among our partners we have two social cooperatives – Polish and Italian, which gives a practical aspect to our deliberations and our project work.

We have noticed that often young entrepreneurs are left alone with their ideas and do not have anyone to help, assist, advise them. Result of our project aims to help adult people develop an entrepreneurship mind-set in the field of VERTICAL FARMING by tackling climate change and unemployment. While dealing with these issues, we aims to foster the use of ICT and wishes to encourage the use of these tools applied to this specific target group, to improve the quality of learning, provide access to resources and services online, while at the same time providing feedback on progress and create the conditions for increasing and improving young people’ entrepreneurial skills and empower them to become more notorious in labour market or to go
forward with their business idea in urban agriculture business field. One of our result is keen to develop crowdsourcing platform.

Objectives

Our main objective in this project is to share experiences, knowledge and acquire useful competences for the future follow- up programs. One of the prospect projects we plan to carry-out is to create an extensive educational program on how to build a social collective for the parties involved. The complexity of this project requires us to become not only practitioners but also to broaden our perspectives on a whole array of subjects around social enterpreneurship. Such enterprise requires us to become real experts in this field and in order to coordinate our future steps accordingly we need to share good practices, find most common and also less common faults in the topic of social enterpreneurship.

Implementation

We plan to foremostly create a close relationships with our new partners in this project. This is also very important to tighten the bonds with our partners from projects of the past. The relationships within partners and stakeholders is something almost unvalueable. It helps creating great projects in the future, provides opportunities for constant growth and development. Transnational cooperation is something that brings people from different cultures to share ideas, exchange thoughts and experiences and create new opportunities from beneficiaries of our projects.

Taking all this in consideration our main activities that we focus on implementing in this stage is to create an environment for the exchange of aquired knowledge through meetings in every organisations’ headquarters.

Results

All the organizations of this consortium deal with similar social issues and problems, including adult education, combating social exclusion, new technologies, and the social economy and entrepreneurship. They are united by solving social problems and have common goals. That is why the SocEnter project was created. Ecoinstituto implemented EU projects in the field of social economy. They also conducted research on social entrepreneurship. Ecoinstituto also implemented EU projects related to new technologies. The Zofia Zamenhof Foundation has been implementing a project on new technologies and social exclusion for NCBiR under the POWER program for a year; Ecoinstituto and the Zofia Zamenhof Foundation are currently jointly implementing one Erasmus Plus project “Marketing skills in social media for young people with disabilities”. The other partners also have many years of experience in innovative training practices as well as in adult education. This project was created as a result of:

– research on social innovations and social coaching conducted by the Zofia Zamenhof Foundation as part of previously implemented projects,
– socio-economic research conducted by Ecoinstituto in recent years,
– extensive practical experience of other partners in adult education and social economy,

– Social Cooperative of Legal Persons “Centrum Usług Środowiskowych” Poland and the social enterprise Centro Solidarietà Giovani “Giovanni Micesio” from Italy.

The main complexity of the project is concerning the educational approach which aims at innovative methods of learning and development through participation in meetings and training, social media as well as informal learning in an online environment. In fact, there are many differences between full-time and online learning in adult education, and research shows that characteristics such as self-discipline, internal motivation, self-reflection, self-esteem, but also external evaluation and exchange of experiences are important in learning. Based on the above conclusions, our project aims to experiment with a new learning method based on innovative online learning, later confronted during meetings and exchange of experiences. The main difference between the training projects proposed in the project is the learning approach based on an innovative informal learning program based on the extensive experience of the partners. Another particularly important aspect concerns the project’s target group consisting of low-skilled and unskilled adults from small and medium-sized towns and villages. Simply put, the project addresses the following innovative issues: – Developing an approach to support non- formal adult learning in innovative online learning; – The impact of virtual relationships and contacts on education and exchange of experiences; – Verifying how informal learning can improve social capital and what factors can improve learning in an online learning environment; – Opportunities for the development of the economy and social entrepreneurship through the exchange of international experiences; – Experimenting with methods for evaluating informal learning programs. – Creation and development of your own training program based on the blended learning method. – Development of social entrepreneurship as a result of deepening the educational process in the field of practical social economy.

All this is done so that the team exchanged experiences and created the concept of a broad project on how to create and conduct a social cooperative. Participants themselves will be able to create similar organizations to help people who are excluded from society. It helps people who are excluded from society in the labour market and makes them work more consciously with such people.