Social Entrepreneurship for Youth

Background The partnership applied for the project based upon our experience of working with youth and interest in social innovation and entrepreneurship as motivators for youth engagement with their community focusing on sustainability, empowerment and inclusion of youth, especially disadvantaged youth. We all believe that participation in any innovation process is both engaging and empowering for those involved especially when the topics of this process are close to one's heart and the environment, we live in, which is the case for social innovation as its focus is on social challenges and social value. Objectives We believe that project outcomes can contribute to social innovation and entrepreneurship training in our regions and countries. Partners have all been active in disseminating and even integrating project results into current education systems and as added value to the ecosystems of social innovation in their countries. The partnership has also promoted project results to stakeholders in other countries within and outside EU and the methodology has already been integrated into social innovation training by CpKp in the Check Republic. Project results have been presented and are partly used by innovation labs, social innovation courses within universities and towards key stakeholders and young entrepreneurs in partner countries. Implementation All activities and outputs introduced in the project proposal were implemented plus some were added such as video interviews with social entrepreneurs, see website and Help Desk for social entrepreneurs on: http://socialentrepreneurshipforyouth.com. All partners implemented a multiplier event to present project results and the final conference was held in Iceland. Online partner meetings were held with 1–2-month interval, kick-off meeting was scheduled to be face to face but this was changed due to the COVID pandemic. Learning/teaching/training activity in Lithuania in May 2022 with participants from all partner countries. Achievements All outputs and activities are presented on project website and Help desk (http://socialentrepreneurshipforyouth.com) being: Social business roadmap for creating a social enterprise in 10 steps, Capacity building courses and training guidelines, videos interviews with social entrepreneurs, piloting of the capacity building course in each country, and the Social entrepreneurs help desk, including all project results plus information on support/grants for social innovation in each partner country, legal frameworks for social innovation and available mentors for social entrepreneurs. Partners also created their own network of stakeholders and young social entrepreneurs that they will continue to support after project finalisation.