Building bridges for circular economy by fostering youth entrepreneurship

Background More than 3.3 million young people (aged 18-28 years) were unemployed in the EU in 2019. The situation got worse with the COVID19 crisis in 2020. At the same time, that crisis has also underlined the need to train people remotely. Many young people encounter the gap between education and 'real life', and get caught in a vicious cycle: unable to get a job due to lack of experience, and unable to gain experience without a job. Youth unemployment rate in 2016 was 15% in Slovenia and Romania , 50% in Greece and 13% in Belgium. Self-employment through building entrepreneurial skills could be part of the solution. For our partnership, it was clear that entrepreneurship education makes a difference: within alumni those who participated in any entrepreneurship training are 5 times more willing to start entrepreneurship activities. Because green entrepreneurship (GE), non-profit activities and circular economy (CE) are interlinked, we decided to create a course for youth between 18-28 years to teach them these concepts. The importance of CE is continually increasing when creating new green jobs, youth entrepreneurship opportunities and a more inclusive economy, and therefore bringing social benefits. Objectives As part of this project, we wanted to create a training on green entrepreneurship and circular economy for young people between 18 and 28 years old interested in entrepreneurship. We wanted this training to be accessible for free online for as many people as possible. Concretely, Building Bridges objectives were acquiring innovative, specialised competencies for youth, by empowering them to make use of GE, creating new CE business models. Our specific goals were - to introduce youth to CE, GE and make attractive, promoting career opportunities - to provide integrated knowledge and skills about CE potentials and benefits, including insights of social impacts, GE and non-profit challenges - to establish CE business models and promote GE business and collaborations at national, regional and European level - to transfer and disseminate in a pan-European level the projects’ results and use of CE for improving the environmental and social impacts - to strenghten networking between partner org., youth, other stakeholders Implementation We organized two activites : a staff training (C1) and a blended mobility (C2). Groupe One organized the staff training during five days. The objective were to get proficient about all the subjects we wanted to develop and test if the contents seemed perfectly relevant to us. We also wanted to have feedbacks to improve what was already done. The staff training took place in Brussels with 13 participants. Once the content was totally written for all the units (theory and exercises), IED developed and managed the courses on the e-learning platform Athena. We carried out a blended mobility exchange with 36 participants in Timisoara for five days to test our plateform and the contents with youths. For the staff training and the blended mobility, we also included visits of green entrepreneurs in Brussels and Timisoara to inspire our plateform (exercises and theory), the youths and the staff. Achievements We achieved two outputs : state-of-the-art and curricula (O1) and the courses (8 units on CE and GE) (O3) We started the project by conducting a state-of-the art about the offer of training on sustainable entrepreneurship and circular economy for youth in Romania, Slovenia, Greece and Belgium Based on x forms, the state-of-the-art highlighted the importance of youth involvement in the field of green entrepreneurship and circular economy business opportunities. Then, we wrote a curricula to promote a program overview and structure of the online courses. We planned to develop a training in 2 chapters of 40 hours each subdivided into 4 units each about GE and CE. A first chapter on GE was divided into 4 modules : history of green entrepreneurship (SDG), business plan in G.E through the business model canva (BMC), financing green business and practical guidance for establishing green entrepreneurship businesses. The second chapter on CE also was divided into 4 modules : introduction to C.E, technical and biological cycles, circular design and circular economy models. All the modulus are accessible on the Athena platform. All units are presented with the following structure : theory (handbook and powerpoint) and exercises.