Although youth unemployment is slowing falling from its post-crisis peak, it remains persistently high, especially in our partners’ countries. Northern Ireland’s youth unemployment is 14.4%, four points above the UK average (1), while Ireland and Poland’s rates are 17%, rising to 30%+ in Croatia (2). Northern Ireland has the lowest rate of total entrepreneurial activity among young people aged 18-24 years within the UK (3) and also has the highest percentage of young people who are NEET across the UK. As globalisation continues to blur cultural boundaries, pop culture is a dynamic area where culture, business and technology meet. EPIC Opportunities for Youth capitalises on this, placing pop culture at the centre of an innovative and engaging approach to help young people develop their own entrepreneurial skills and cultural awareness. It is particularly appealing to young people. Many young people, especially early school leavers and migrants, face unemployment, underemployment or disadvantage in the labour market, generating economic and social repercussions. Entrepreneurship provides an alternative route to professional and personal fulfilment and the ability to contribute directly to society based on each individual’s unique skillset. Thanks to the Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan more young people now gain access to entrepreneurship in school/university, but what about the young people outside formal education? We believe that we can, and must, do more to build entrepreneurial skills among this group of young people. We will do so in two ways. Firstly, partner organizations blend a mix of experience in youth work with minority groups and NEETs, entrepreneurship education and pedagogic expertise which will be used to develop and share innovative approaches to non-formal learning, especially via digital tools. Ithis way, the project enables the participation of a much wider group of young people than is possible through traditional youth or VET structures on their own. Our project will directly increase the availability and quality of entrepreneurship education for young people from all backgrounds by developing resources that enable: - community based youth workers to introduce/improve their entrepreneurship education; - enterprise development organizations to adopt non-formal teaching strategies that better serve young people outside formal education Pop culture is highly strategic choice of topic, being both accessible and appealing to young people from across all social backgrounds, and highly actionable in our current economic situations (pop culture phenomena are driving rapid tourism and activity growth in participating countries.) The Pop Culture Entrepreneurship Resource Pack (IO1) will explain the relationship between pop culture and inclusive entrepreneurship, and then by engaging with the learning framework (IO3) or learning/collaborating online with other young people (IO4) the project will reinforce young people’s confidence to explore their sense of initiative and develop new entrepreneurial projects. The overall objective of EPIC is clear: increase the number of disadvantaged young people who, through access to high quality entrepreneurship education, develop their entrepreneurial skills & encourage them to develop, market and manage their own enterprise using opportunities provided by pop culture. To reach as many young people as possible, our specific objectives are to: a) Create & disseminate two resource packs establishing the value of pop culture for enabling inclusive entrepreneurship education and intercultural skills development (IO1) and the role of innovative digital learning tools for this purpose (IO2) b) Develop one innovative framework for pop culture entrepreneurship education in non-formal youth education and make it available as OERs for youth and enterprise organizations to use in their groups (IO3) (user test reach of 80 youth eductators) and as an online platform (IO4) for direct access by individual young people (total reach of 2,500). c) Put the resources into action by training 600 young people in the user testing of the first EPIC Programme d) Motivate & guide youth and enterprise organizations to introduce this new approach into their portfolio of services for young people e) Evaluate & share all of the above with 500 stakeholder organizations to encourage improvements in entrepreneurship education in youth sector The impact chain of the project involves the following groups: 1. YOUTH EDUCATORS are the first phase of our change process because only through them can we reach the large numbers of young people that we hope to impact. 2. YOUNG PEOPLE, especially NEETS and those at DISADVANTAGE, will receive high quality early stage entrepreneurship education. 3. YOUTH WORK, EDUCATION AND ENTERPRISE DEVELOPMENT ORGANIZATIONS will understand the need to spur skills development in disadvantaged youth in new ways.
CONTEXT The context of the project was high youth unemployment levels and disadvantage in the labour market, set against an increasingly dynamic pop culture, where culture, business and technology mix organically. Crucial competencies and support within enterprise education, youth work and mainstream education were compartmentalised in a way that did not reflect the dynamic, blended opportunities within pop culture. Youth workers excel at outreach and skills development, but partner research shows 76% currently don't teach entrepreneurship or only do so in a limited way. On the other hand 68% of VET/enterprise development organizations in the UK’s NI Enterprise Network lack a training model aimed specifically at young people outside formal education. Enterprise trainers in our regions are generally inexperienced in working with disadvantaged youth, being tied into a framework where success is evaluated by business creation rather than entrepreneurial skills development. The context also included a very challenging environment for the project, for educators and for business with the advent of Covid 19. The EPIC project set out to increase the the availability and quality of entrepreneurship education for young people from all backgrounds by developing a flexible and accessible set of resources that bridges the gaps identified and was easily adaptable to young people outside formal education. Partner organizations blended experience in youth work, entrepreneurship education and pedagogic expertise to come up with a set of resources that were tuned to the new reality of the post Covid environment and better serve young people outside formal education, where impacts from the pandemic were severe. Pop culture is highly strategic choice of topic, being both accessible and actionable in our current economic situation. Before the Covid crisis pop culture phenomena were driving rapid tourism and digital enterprise. During the lockdowns a massive shift to activity online only emphasised an underlying trend towards digital pop culture, and we reflected this in our final set of resources, leveraging pop culture as a painless motivator and engagement tool to help young people develop their own entrepreneurial skills, finding alternative routes to professional and personal fulfilment.. ACTIVITIES We created 3 intellectual outputs: - A Resource Pack in English, Polish, Italian and Croatian for trainers, youth workers and educators. Explaining the relationship between pop culture and entrepreneurship, the opportunities available, the value of using of pop culture entrepreneurship as a path towards personal and professional development, motivating youth workers and stakeholders with practical guidance on how to introduce pop culture entrepreneurship education into their organizations. - A Digital Resource Pack in English, Polish, Italian and Croatian. An attractive, convenient, usable set of innovative digital tools with clear guidance on which tools offer the best solutions to achieving pedagogical objectives. - Accessible Open Education Resources in English, Polish, Italian and Croatian. A framework of 5 modules and a Trainers Manual for use in informal settings by youth and enterprise organisations. This framework delivers early stage pop culture entrepreneurship education in an adaptable way, with the option to extract sections or move in a sequential way through the material, depending on the setting, confidence and engagement levels of the young people involved. The materials are deliberately visual, multimedia and free of jargon. They offer different pathways into entrepreneurship that value and are tailored to the interests and culture of young people. Many of whom lack the family, financial or educational backgrounds that would enable them to be entrepreneurial in mainstream economies. The multimedia resources are presented in image based Powerpoint, PDFs, ebooks and video for accessibility. Throughout the development of the Intellectual Outputs we worked closely with youth workers and educators inside and outside the project partners to get feedback and to adapt the resources. This was particularly important as the Covid crisis unfolded and we responded by redrafting the intellectual outputs to emphasis emerging digital business opportunities. We also: - Adapted the resources and developed a week of digital training that delivered skills development and support to educators, VETs, Youth Workers and young people. - Delivered a blend of online and physical events to motivate & guide youth, VET and enterprise organizations to introduce this new approach into their portfolio of services. - Engaged 121 participants from youth work, VET, enterprise development and neet target groups in multipliers and 161 youth educators and VETs in evaluations of IOs. - Logged 20,787 hits on the website in the final year of the project, 5,500 resource downloads, reach figures of over 252,000.