Empowering Rural Tourism through Entreprenuership with Youth

Background Entrepreneurship plays an important role in ensuring the development of rural areas and increasing employment opportunities. Creating entrepreneurial ecosystems in a sector that supports rural development such as tourism is very important especially for young people. Rural entrepreneurship training is needed for young people to open their own businesses with rural tourism entrepreneurship and to create employment in rural areas. Equality of opportunity will be provided to young people by making this education open access and accessible to many young people. The lack of an open access education in the field of rural tourism entrepreneurship with our research has led to the emergence of the RURALYOUTH project. With the development and implementation of the RURALYOUTH project, the main goal of the project is to create a training program that will be needed by young people, youth workers, entrepreneur candidates and existing entrepreneurs in the field of rural tourism entrepreneurship and to integrate this training program into its online and open access platform. Thus, creating equal opportunities for young people has become the priority of the project consortium. Objectives The RURALYOUTH Project prioritized the creation of the training program that young people need to learn about rural tourism entrepreneurship and start their own ventures, the examination of good practices and the development of young people as rural entrepreneurs. For this reason, all consortium members worked together to develop an open and online access training platform, produced the needed materials, and diligently continued the necessary work for the project to reach more audiences. The achievements we want to achieve with this project are as follows: * Establishment of the rural tourism entrepreneurship training program needed by the European Union *Designing events for European Youth Strategies *Compiling and sharing the training and knowledge needed to create an entrepreneurial ecosystem for young people to take an active role in rural areas and to prevent migration from rural to urban areas. * Raising awareness about rural tourism entrepreneurship *Bringing rural communities, entrepreneurs, young people and local governments together *Producing high-efficiency outputs by working with external and internal evaluators * Dissemination of project outputs Implementation Within the scope of the RURALYOUTH project, many activities were designed during the project process in order to create the education and information infrastructure that young people need in order to create a better rural entrepreneurship ecosystem. These events are as follows: *Creation of Best Practices Handbook *Creating RURALPEDIA and INVESTPEDIA outputs so that they can learn the terminology in rural tourism entrepreneurship and investment fields *Creation of RURALYOUTH training program * Establishment of an online and open access education platform to provide equal opportunities for young people * Training of trainers with training of trainers activity * Bringing young people, rural communities and local governments together with the International Rural Entrepreneurship Summit * Increasing the visibility of the project with dissemination activities * Increasing the quality of project outputs with evaluation activities *Conducting transnational project meetings and online coordination meetings in order to carry out the project in a better way. Achievements In order for the RURALYOUTH project to achieve the expected goals, many outputs have been determined. The outcomes and results that emerged during the project are as follows. 1. Three outputs emerged in the project. The first output is the good practice handbook. The good practice handbook contains 12 good practice examples. Within this output, RURALPEDIA and INVESTPEDIA outputs have also been created so that they can learn the terminology in the fields of rural tourism entrepreneurship and investment. For these studies, 22 authors were studied and 110 items were prepared. The second project output is the design of the RURALYOUTH training program. This training program consists of six modules. The third output is the installation of the RURALYOUTH E-learning platform. 2. One of the important activities during the project process is the training of the trainer. 12 trainers were trained with LTTA. With the 3rd International Rural Entrepreneurship Summit, 100 participants were reached. 4. To evaluate the project, 6 internal and 18 external evaluators were worked with. 5. With the dissemination of the project, approximately 25000 people were reached.