Many youth are longing to find ways to marry their care for the world with their need to make a living. For many, this paradox seems impossible to solve and they end up opting for ‘business as usual’, relegating engagement for sustainability issues to their free time or even resigning from active citizenship. Youth are in need not only of hands-on entrepreneurial skills, but also of skills and access points that enable them to build networks of trust and mutual respect within the emerging and diverse societies they are growing into. ECO GAMER addresses the need to provide accessible routes to social entrepreneurship, self realisation and empowerment, economic security and meaningful livelihoods. The project will innovate new pedagogical tools that utilise previous project-based learnings and needs analyses with a strong evidence base that interactive entrepreneurial education pedagogies such as Game-Based Learning (GBL) and Educational Live Action Role Playing (edularp) can be used to deeply educate and positively affect educational attainment and harness creativity. Using the the deep experience of social enterprise development and youth work in social entrepreneurship training held within the project partnership, we will initiate a youth-to-youth facilitator network, create an online learning platform, and develop open-licensed tools that will be available for youth organisations outside the partnership to use within their own social entrepreneurship trainings across Europe. ECO GAMER will resource, implement, disseminate and evaluate three central intellectual outputs in order to reach our target beneficiaries and achieve our objectives: 1) Create a holistic and scientifically sound ECO Assessment available in different online and offline formats for both individuals and groups to map and assess their lifestyles through the lens ecovillage design principles: a framework used to depict community regeneration of social and natural environments and active contribution to the UN SDGs through participatory design in four dimensions of sustainability: social, cultural, ecological and economy. 2) Use Game-Based Learning principles to create an innovative and experiential social entrepreneurship, collaborative leadership and community building training in the form of a live action project-development and implementation ECO Game, playable by both individuals and groups, online and offline. The ECO Game is an edularp game: an actual live action activity where local youth will implement projects and solutions in their communities in real-time. The Game will support players to connect to their purpose, strengthen community participation, build self-confidence, practice collaborative leadership skills, and empower youth with the spirit of social entrepreneurship. 3) Build an online ECO Online Platform to showcase the accomplishments, skills, projects and implemented solutions of participants through interactive maps, profile pages and scoring systems connected with the ECO Game and the ECO Assessment. In parallel the platform will include search functions to find ongoing Games and youth Game Facilitators online. The target beneficiaries of ECO GAMER fall into two core groups: a) Disadvantaged youth - Primarily youth identified to be from disadvantaged background, unemployed, representative of marginalised groups and peoples with low levels of education. A special focus will be put on young unemployed people, including graduates, and those in rural deprived areas. b) Budding young social entrepreneurs - Interested in developing social enterprises that will benefit the core target group of disadvantaged and marginalised youth, we will target youth with budding passion and drive to tangibly impact their communities. In total we will hold 9 multiplier events in the UK, Italy, Egypt, Portugal, and Switzerland. A total of 172 direct beneficiaries through the multipliers. In addition, we will hold a blended youth training event to train 25 Game Facilitators (including online mentoring) and a youth worker training for another 25. The project will end with a blended mobility where a 2 month online course will engage at least 50 participants in the Game, culminating in a live-action Game in the UK. All participants for multipliers will be expected to fall into the categories given above related to disadvantage, and/or social entrepreneurship. The partnership will hold a total of 5 transnational meetings. All IOs developed within this project will be assimilated into GEN and GEN-Europe's core work. Within the project partnership we will begin to train the first set of youth Game Facilitators to lead ECO Games. After completion, the training of such facilitators will be continued primarily by GEN and GEN-Europe to ensure that the Game becomes self-multiplying continues to experientially promote economic security and engage youth in sustainable project design and implementation for years to come.
Young people are facing the dilemma of maturing into adulthood facing social exclusion, difficulties securing meaningful work, and few opportunities to engage practically with sustainability issues. In many countries, youth unemployment rates are high, putting millions at risk of social exclusion, depression and lack of opportunities. The pandemic has only worsened the situation. These issues are compounded by the many socioeconomic and ecological crises we are collectively facing, and the realisation that to reach the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement, initiatives are desperately needed to encourage young people to engage and take leadership. ECO GAMER seeks to empower young people from diverse backgrounds to assess their local contexts, and design, implement and celebrate regenerative solutions together whilst augmenting their skills to enter a competitive job market. In-line with the Europe 2020 Strategy that spotlights youth entrepreneurship as a key objective, we recognise that social inclusion can emerge from actively collaborating in beneficial community projects. Similarly, an EU Council report entitled ‘Conclusions on Promoting Youth Entrepreneurship to Foster Social Inclusion of Young People’ recognises that social entrepreneurship “present[s] great opportunities for transforming young people's creativity and human capital into smart growth and jobs’ and “is a powerful tool to promote social inclusion and social engagement especially among the youth”. To this end, and with creativity, interactivity and active engagement at its heart, ECO GAMER uses an innovatively playful approach to activate and connect youth to start social enterprise and build community 'where they stand' whilst contributing towards sense of purpose and self-esteem. Using innovative pedagogies based on Game Based Learning, Educational Live Action Roleplaying Games, Education for Sustainable Development, and Nature Based Solutions to climate change, we created a set of open source resources for young people, youth workers, students and researchers as well as for any place-based communities or projects wishing to better understand their own impact and potential. These include: 1) A holistic and scientifically sound Impact Assessment for individuals and place-based communities, projects, groups or families. The Impact Assessment is available in different online and offline formats for both individuals and groups to map and assess their lifestyles through the lens of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as well as through a set of Ecovillage Design Principles: a framework used to depict community regeneration through participatory design in four dimensions of sustainability: social, cultural, ecological and economy. The Assessment is accessible online, with live results presented visually. It can also be done through an interactive downloadable spreadsheed using radar charts to give easily comparable results, or as a live session with a group, using a deck of cards developed by the project. 2) An innovative and experiential social entrepreneurship, collaborative leadership and sustainable community building training in the form of a live action game called the Game of Regeneration, playable in teams or with individual players in multiple formats, including a live action role playing game and a tabletop version. In both versions, players solve missions and implement projects and solutions in their communities in real-time. The game contains a 95 page facilitators manual detailing all steps, excercises, sessions, necessary materials and elements of the game, a game myth. It also contains 4 decks of cards: 9 stepping stones to track the journey of the game; ecovillage design cards to map the journey through cultural, economic, ecological and social regeneration; challenge and quality cards that add randomness to the game. It also contains a tile-based gameboard for the tabletop version. Engaging primarily young people, many of them unemployed and from rural areas, students, youth-workers, teachers, researchers and local sustainable community members and project, we also achieved the following: - 8 youth-led and designed projects for local regeneration prototyped, with 3 receiving support through a social business incubator. - 200 good practices for local and community-scale action for social, cultural, economic and ecological regeneration researched and curated - 16 Regenerative Development Goals with 170 subgoals for community-led action formulated - 201 people engaged in multiplier events - 121 people, most below 25 and many from rural or economically depressed areas, played the Game, with hundreds more playing teasers during dissemination events - 20 youth and 15 youthworkers trained as Game and Assessment Facilitators - 880 people completed an Impact Assessment - strong friendships between partner organisation as well as multiple new alliances and projects created