Entrepreneurship Impact and Youth Work as related to Community Development and Sustainability

Background Through our investigations and observations, we found that young people over the years have been pioneers of change and we think that if well-skilled, EU youth can contribute to the creation of sustainable communities through impact-oriented activities & projects. As young people and youth workers, we felt the need to be catalysts of change who have to raise awareness on issues related to sustainability, environmental protection & youth participation. Therefore, we created this project with the scope of innovating new project design tools that put project impact awareness at their core (community impact, environmental impact, youth participation), by building upon existing good practices in relation to this topic from different socio-cultural settings in Europe. To sustain that need, we found that statistics and studies have proved beyond doubts that programmes such as Erasmus+, have contributed massively to the empowerment and engagement of young people in their local communities. In our project context, especially in a post-COVID-19 situation, we wanted to look at how youth workers and EU youth can contribute to youth empowerment, community development & the overall attainment of SDGs. Objectives Throughout the implementation of the "Empactpreneuriat" project, we aimed to: O1. Inform European youth on the impact of their activities over the community; O2. Promote the exchange of good practices within European youth as related to SDGs, environmental protection and community development and trigger a youth-led campaign, using a bottom-up approach where young people & youth workers are pioneers of change that will design and implement projects & entrepreneurial initiatives that will have a positive impact on their immediate environment & communities; O3. Capacitate at least 100 EU youth workers to embed sustainability & environmental protection education into their youth work; O4. Promote a common understanding of the concept of environmental impact as related to youth work & youth-led projects (community projects, entrepreneurial ventures, etc.) Implementation Over the course of the project, we developed: IO1. an impact report on the local level impact of various forms of youth work projects and youth-led projects and or entrepreneurship (as related to environmental protection & SDGs). IO2. a digital guide (IO2) on sustainable project management in youth work and SDGs' reinforcement at European local levels. This contains tools and methods resulting from IO1 which can be adapted and replicated in different youth work or youth-led projects. Staff members of the partner organizations were trained in an intensive joint staff training session (C1), who then organized internal trainings in their organizations for the other staff. At the end of this process, they proceeded to local campaigns and other events to train other youth workers in their communities as well as young people who are invested in project management and local entrepreneurship. With a mixture of plenary discussions, group work and prototyping solutions to key challenges related to the topic, the Final Conference of Empactpreneuriat, brought together over 45 participants from Romania, Bulgaria, Estonia, France, Greece and Portugal in an effort to identify the role of youth work in the attainment of SDGs. Achievements QUANTITATIVE RESULTS: IO1. an impact report on the local level impact of various forms of youth work projects and youth-led projects and or entrepreneurship (as related to environmental protection & SDGs) - https://empact.pro/results-2/ IO2. a digital guide (IO2) on sustainable project management in youth work and SDGs' reinforcement at European local levels. This contains tools and methods resulting from IO1 which can be adapted and replicated in different youth work or youth-led projects - https://empact.pro/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/EP_DigitalGuide-1.pdf Other quantitative results: Direct conscientization of 15 staff from the 4 partner NGOs about projects’ impact as related to the environment, SDGs and community development; Local training of about 50 youth workers based on project partners’ local training events on project impact assessment; Dissemination of project results (IOs) to more than 100 people during the multiplier event and other local community engagement events and meetings.