Time for Society Europe (T4S) aims at developing and delivering innovative methods and tools to connecting Continuing Professional Development (CPD) with Corporate Social Responsibility Projects (CSR) in cultural, social and environmental fields. The project is based on an approach that has been developed in Belgium to increase the attractiveness and the participation of employees in CPD. Meanwhile the project has been developed by the biggest CSR provider in the country and comprises a number of 50 enterprises, among them also the largest companies in the country. In many European member states the participation in CPD is rather low or at least erratic, very often the CPD offers do not match with the interests of the employees. Especially CPDs targeting personal and social competences are very often only supply oriented and not needs driven. On the other side, employers and enterprises are aiming to support social projects to contribute to society and to create positive image and branding. This is the starting point of Time for Society Europe. It connects Professional Development on Personal, Social and Organisational Competences with projects that serve the society, be it in cultural/intercultural (heritage and integration), social (working with disabled and disadvantaged persons), environmental or health related projects. T4S will be connected with a holistic learning approach based on competence oriented informal, non-formal learning and validation and a practical and needs-driven learning approach. The T4S programme will be facilitated by Adult Education professionals in the participating enterprises and organisations. The project will develop a modular CPD for European Adult Educators who want to further qualify in the T4S approach, extend their professional portfolio and attract new clients in the field of CSR coaching and training. The T4S-CPD for AE professionals is based on a specific competence framework and will be delivered in blended learning modality which includes F2F, e-learning and competence validation modules. The project will be intensively disseminated and valorised through national and international networks of the AE communities but also via international enterprise networks that will be included from the beginning. T4S will be piloted with 20 professionals who will set up their practical project in an enterprise. The best projects will be awarded in a final conference.
Time4Society Europe aimed to develop innovative methods and tools that link ‘Continuing Professional Development’ (CPD) with ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ (CSR) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Based on the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), the project developed ways to make Continuing Professional Development (CPD) for Educational Professionals more attractive by addressing attractive, meaningful and socially relevant topics and linking them to internal training topics. In doing so, the project placed a strong emphasis on the topic of Sustainable Development (SD) and a modular learning programme for staff, as this sub-topic showed the greatest acceptance, the greatest feasibility (within the framework of the UN SDGs) and also the greatest adaptability in times of limited meeting opportunities in social projects. The project pursued the idea of qualifying educational staff from adult education institutions as facilitators for CSR and SD. In this context, 27 persons were trained, who in turn developed projects for further training. These implementation projects could also be carried out under Corona conditions in all partner countries. The project proceeded according to plan until winter 2020. By this time, an inventory of possibilities and limitations of training in the field of CSR/SD had been carried out. The project follows a competence-based learning approach; therefore, a competence framework was developed, which describes the potential competences to be developed by the staff and trainers and divides them into competence levels along the LEVEL5 taxonomy. This enables both the competence-oriented development of learning modules (O3) and the corresponding piloting and validation in O5. Still in 2019, a first training of 11 staff members was carried out in Turin, some of whom were still able to carry out pilot projects in face-to-face CSR projects. Due to the limitations of the COVID situation, the T4S Europe concept had to be adapted and part of the pilots had to be carried out online. For this purpose, an SDG Explorer self-learning programme was developed on the T4S platform. This gave interested employees the opportunity to work out the topic of Sustainable Development Goals online as a tool for CSR projects in the field of sustainability. Another group of 16 educational professionals joined the second online CPD in 2021. As integral part of the CPDs, design thinking workshops were held in the pilots, from which concrete ideas for CSR and SD projects were developed. In the process, the adult educators were qualified as "Facilitators of Design Based Collaborative Learning (DBCL) for Sustainable Development and CSR". The T4S Europe learning platform (O4) served as a common development space (via mahara groups), LMS for app and trainer training modules (moodle) and validation tool LEVEL5. The platform was used in combination with synchronous and collaborative tools, creating not only real interaction but also a productive learning environment online. This powerful combination of asynchronous, synchronous and collaborative tools and actions was the main reason why the project was successfully completed with more participants than originally planned, despite the pandemic. Through the adaptation processes (learning modules, and the online methodology), the intended goals regarding the qualification of the adult educators and the pilot projects could be achieved. As an additional "product", the SDG Explorer was developed, which enables employees to initially educate themselves in the area of the SDGs. With the help of the acquired knowledge, employees can initiate projects and activities themselves that contribute to increased sustainability and CSR in companies. For the trainers (we call them "Learning and Development Facilitators"), this gives them the opportunity to access an upstream learning programme. In combination with a self-validation, the participants receive an initial profile of their acquired knowledge in the 17 SDGs. The subsequent development phase, which was carried out for the first time over up to seven synchronous modules in combination with the learning platform, clearly showed that transnational cooperation projects can also be facilitated online, and can then be concretely implemented in local initiatives.. This is ultimately the greatest impact of the T4S Europe project - the further development of a successful face-to-face format for CSR projects into an approach that makes it possible to develop relevant social and sustainable projects in European cooperation online. The experiences and concrete projects were presented in the context of two online conferences with more than 100 participants each and have already been implemented in the context of one KA1 course.