SP - Youth Entrepreneurial Spirit Specialists

Background The partner regions identified the following common challenges and needs: -Young people leaving rural areas, because of youth unemployment and/or lack of motivation and activities - Many young people want to stay in the rural areas but don't see sustainable options for a good life there “Local communities are the ones that are directly affected by the consequences of brain drain", states the EU CoR in its opinion on brain drain (Feb 2020). The opinion suggests "that Local and Regional Authorities set up local alliances, including all stakeholders, which are able to draft and implement local policies that help to mitigate brain drain." The aim of the YESpecialists project is to strengthen youth entrepreneurship in rural areas by building strong regional/local ecosystems that focus on involving young people in the community, help them find their role within it, strengthen their entrepreneurial competences (EntreComp) and empower them to take an active role in identifying and covering local needs and theirs. Objectives YESpecialist's goal: to gather experts from six European regions in Italy, Croatia, Denmark, Spain and Norway, plus a European network of regional & local authorities for lifelong learning (EARLALL in Brussels), to build up local ecosystems to boost youth entrepreneurship in rural areas, introducing non-formal and informal methods into formal EntreComp (entrepreneurial competences) education and to promote innovative entrepreneurship ideas and concepts. The project's focus was on rural areas and vulnerable young people. Methodology: developing local activities trough cooperation between all four categories of local stakeholders (public authorities, business sector, NGOs and schools), together with young people (bottom-up approach). The three key outputs of the project are: IO1: a repository with good examples of youth entrepreneurship in rural areas at European level, https://yespecialists.eu/yes-in-europe/ , IO2: a youth entrepreneurship toolkit for teachers and trainers https://yespecialists.eu/capacity-building/ and IO3: Guidelines for building up regional/local ecosystems to promote youth entrepreneurship in rural areas: https://yespecialists.eu/yes-ecosystems/. In addition we developed Policy Recommendations. Implementation We implemented all the activities that we promised: -YES Festival, our Multiplier Event in Brussels, 2nd March 2023 -YES-YOU!, our online youth event, where young participants were showcasing activities in their local ecosystems, 16th March 2023 -Four Transnational Project meetings (TPM 1-4) during the project period 2020-23. Because of Covid, two TPMs were online. -Two Learning/Teaching/Training Activities (LLT 1 and 2): workshops in Trento and Varazdin, as planned in 2022. Achievements Intellectual Output 1: a repository with good examples of youth entrepreneurship in rural areas at European level, https://yespecialists.eu/yes-in-europe/ Intellectual Output 2: a youth entrepreneurship toolkit for teachers and trainers, https://yespecialists.eu/capacity-building/ Intellectual Output 3: Guidelines ("Five Steps") for building up regional/local ecosystems to promote youth entrepreneurship in rural areas: https://yespecialists.eu/yes-ecosystems/ The five steps to create a local ecosystem is tranferable to also fields other than outh entrepreneurship!! Policy Recommendations in the field of promoting youth entrepreneurship in rural Europe We built six local ecosystems in support of youth entrepreneurship in Europe with 6 pilot projects We built a community of 60 trained YESpecialists + 120 locally YESpecialists. Young people were consulted all along the project, co-creating some of the training material, proposing and leading entrepreneurial projects with and for the community, participating at the YES-YOU festival. A better understanding and increased use of the European Entrepreneurship Competence Framework (EntreComp) to boost entrepreneurial mindset in the partner regions and the rest of Europe