The project "European Diversity - How cosmopolitan entrepreneurship can increase social awareness" is a cooperation of three secondary schools from Spain, Germany and The Netherlands. Participants are students aged 14-16 from those schools. The main objectives of the project include: - preservation of the European spirit - raising of the awareness of respect - recognition of cultural diversity - tolerance towards origin, gender, disability, religion - avoidance of discrimination - acquisition of knowledge of entrepreneurship To achieve our objectives the participants need to be more socially inclusive, cater for all the members of the society and be able to produce an economic boost through the training, the development of skills of our future citizens and their professional development through the promotion of their entrepreneurial skills. For all those reasons, we decided to build a project that would promote the social awareness of our students, and would enhance and boost their professional and entrepreneurial skills through the development of critical thinking and problem solving abilities. The students will do researches on different sorts of discrimination and look for information on the laws that aim at reducing discrimination. They will also analyse the work of NGOs. As a final product and as a result of a needs analysis, the students will simulate the creation of an NGO that will aim at solving one of the social issues across the three countries of their choice. The students will learn how a company works, and more specifically how an NGO works. We want them to be able to develop a business plan for their NGO that will involve funding search. As a part of the business plan, they will also have to design an advertising campaign for the charity organization in order to be known by the potential affiliates. The most relevant and interesting aspect will be to raise awareness around the specific issue aimed at by the NGO. The students will disseminate their work and look for support and try to start a change in their own environments. To reach all that the students will also have to develop their skills in the use of technology and the digital media. They will have to change their perspective on the use of the Internet and get to learn the possibilities of them in terms of finding information and disseminating their work and organizing socially. Through the use of Facebook, YouTube, Change.org among others, they will implement their advertising campaigns and raise social awareness at the same time. All our products and results will be shared by using social media platforms like Change.org, Facebook, Youtube or even Twitter that will be used also to measure the impact of our project on our respective communities.
The project "European Diversity - How Cosmopolitan Entrepreneurship Can Boost Social Awareness" is a project that focuses on sensitizing students to discrimination, racism and any other forms of exclusion. In addition to the everyday discrimination, we have put the focus on the business world and the opportunity in the context of non-governmental organizations (NGO) or charitie organisation to take action against existing grievances. Everything was brought down to student level respectively the reality of life of the students to take action in the end. In total, around 40 students per partner school participated in the exchanges. At national level, much more students were involved in the project at the individual partner schools. The accompanying teachers changed regularly - also the school management (headmaster and vice headmaster; Germany) were involved. Although the coordinators of the partner schools were in charge of the projects, 2-4 other colleagues were always involved I the project. Due to the great interest of the students in the project, the partners decided directly at the beginning of the project to increase the number of participants and thus the number of short-term exchanges (C). The partners agreed that increasing the number of exchanges from 4 to 6 would make sense, and that the additional costs would be acceptable. This resulted in a small shift in content during the activities (C1-C6). Therefore it was possible to work with more intense on cognitively more complex tasks, such as the creation of a business plan. In addition, products could be produced (especially in C6) that were not originally planned (final film). All the partners involved are thoroughly satisfied with the results. We created a lot of posters and videos. But the biggest product is the "founded" NGOs of the students. During the foundation phase, the planning, the promotion, etc., it was easily possible to recognize the commitment with which the pupils were actively involved in the topic. The increased social awareness of discrimination is clearly perceptible. Due to the planned implementation ("Action Day" of the NGOs, eg "Hot Cups for Homeless" in Germany) long after the end of the project, with completely different students, the long-term effect of the project is given.