Cultural & Social Youth Entrepreneurship

Background Youth unemployment remains on an upwards trajectory across Europe. However, at the same time, young people are innovating and have strong motivation to create new markets and jobs. Youth is still suffering the effects of the economic crisis and COVID, the Ukrainian war and Brexit have not made it easier for young people. In 2021, the EU youth unemployment rate was 13.0 %. The creative cultural industries (CCIs) play an important role in fostering job creation, economic growth and innovation and have been identified by the European Commission as a resilient sector in times of economic crisis. Moreover, the traditional educational model is not designed to encourage entrepreneurship as a possible employment opportunity. This motivated us to create a project that would promote social entrepreneurship skills among young people and help them transform their ideas and creative solutions to current social problems into entrepreneurial projects, to show them that they can make a future for themselves independently, and that they can do so while solving social problems in their community and promoting culture. Objectives The objectives we wanted to achieve, especially in the long term, were as follows: 1. Raising awareness about the positive social impact that social enterprises in the CCIs have on the society as well as the opportunities they offer to young people. 2. Implement research activities on the state of the art and learn more about what already exists. 3. Develop learning materials for both professionals and young people, to support the development of young social entrepreneurship in the CCIs field. 4. Involve and interact with a wide set of stakeholders (from CCIs, social economy and education field), ranging from young people, entrepreneurs, organisations, educators, policy makers, etc. 5. Explore the link and opportunities offered in the last two year about the New European Bauhaus and link with the topics of the project. 6. Provide young entrepreneurs in the aforementioned sectors with a sustainable ecosystem of support that they can count on once they decide to embark on the adventure of social entrepreneurship. 7. Develop youth work methodologies and tools adapted to the current situations experienced by young people. 8. Show youth workers the importance of updating their work with young people and thus be able to offer them different alternatives and career opportunities to build their future. Implementation The activities that were taken by the partnership are as follows: 1. Research activities and collection of best practices 2. Development of the programme model framework 3. Development of the policy recommendations 4. Development of the handbook 5. Training of Trainers and policy workshop 6. National events and networking activities 7. Awareness raising and communication activities, and development of a wide set of dissemination tools 8.Partners meeting and constant communication - continuous follow-up meetings in online format between all partner organisations; attendance in person at transnational meetings; attendance in person at the LTT in Milan; 9. finalisation of the IO1 and IO3; 10. Creation of the CASYE ecosystem; 11. Preparation of progress reports; 12. Participated in the quality control of the project; 13. Translation of the documents into the different participating languages 14. 6 newsletters; 4 Press Releases 15. Piloting of the final outcomes Achievements The project outputs were very well defined and their realisation enriched the panorama of tools, to support young entrepreneurs in the cultural and social fields. In concrete terms, we achieved the following outputs: 1. an online ecosystem to support youth entrepreneurs in European creative, cultural and social sectors (https://casyeproject.eu/) 2. the Casye Handbook, to give shape to the business idea 3. the mentoring program 4. policy recommendations 5. the background research "young people: the situation, needs and challenges" 6. the collection of European good practices of youth social and cultural enterprises Furthermore, the project allowed us to obtain other results: 7. get to know better and strengthen the relationship with other European organizations dealing with youth entrepreneurship from different points of view, including the one of policies 8. to know some very innovative social and cultural entrepreneurial realities in Europe 9. strengthen internal skills on the subject, useful for the promotion and implementation of other projects in the youth, cultural and social sector.