Core goal of the project was to create a framework and situation enabling our young participants to have meaningful experiences abroad and to offer the opportunity for lasting effects in quality and quantity-wise not achievable in a few weeks in their routing environment back in Germany, particularly: - measurable improvement of their active and passive command of their host country’s language - extraordinary personality development by leaving behind their comfort zone back home - developing an understanding of their host country’s culture – particularly in the working environment – from within - developing a general understanding and appreciation of the value of the plurality of values, developments and culture-specific work attitudes - acquiring culture-specific work techniques and communication strategies - experiencing models of work organization, office techniques, vocational knowledge and models of cooperation specific to their host country - developing from within an understanding of Europe as a joint, unified sphere of culture as well as for work and life In addition, we want to carry out our annual Europass Ceremony with the current Mayor of Berlin to garner publicity for our work. This finally worked out again in 2022 with the participation of Ms Franziska Giffey.
This project was carried out to help our participants develop in regards to their vocational curriculum, on the language level, to learn new methods and in interaction. In addition, it is our goal to make vocational training in Berlin more attractive and international. Furthermore youth unemployment shall be reduced by strengthening the youths personality development. The main focus of our activities are the vocational students and trainees. This project follows the goals of the charta strategy as well as the 10%-goal as stipulated by the Senate Department of Education as well as the Mayor’s Office. The Governing Mayor of Berlin, Ms Franziska Giffery personally pointed out in her address to the attendees of the GoEurope Europass-Ceremony on November 23, 2022 that the number of mobilities in the City State of Berlin should be increased and stated that GoEurope will be a key player to achieve this goal. This project was carried during and at the height of the Corona pandemic and was affected by various pandemic measures. Therefore a key goal of this project was to maintain and protect our internal, local and international structures and networks. For this reason we decided to continue realizing mobilities – wherever and whenever possible – during the pandemic, despite the numerous difficult measures in place. At the same we expressly believe that young people have the right to receive opportunities to develop their personalities, their language competences, vocational competences abroad - despite all the pandemic measures in place. Consequently we chose not follow the “example” set by several German states and many Erasmus+ players to shut down and not carry out any mobilities at all. At the same time we abided to the numerous measures as put in place by the City State of Berlin, the Federal Government of Germany, the transportation companies, our host organisations, the governments of the European countries and regions, the host companies and host families. All these continuously changing measures required replanning mobilities multiple times on different levels. As recommended by the National Agency we made use of the new Erasmus+ funds for the 2021-2027 period as soon as the funds were usable and to return funds in the project in question here, we were able to use “only” 721,000 euros available in this project. For this reason most of the mobilities in this project were carried during the pandemic, a smaller number as the pandemic was subsiding but the general assumption was that strict measures were likely to return any moment and acting careful was prerequisite. The only exception to this situation are 19 mobilities carried out during the last two months of the project as the 2021 project with 2.7 million euros of funding was full with participants to maximum capacity. Therefore we made use of this 2020 project to fund those mobilities against are standard procedures for quality management without accompanying teachers to assure quality as business travel was forbidden for employees of the Senate Department of Education for a prolonged period and couldn’t be executed here. A total of 222 mobilities are registered in this project of which 193 could be carried out and 29 mobilities could not be carried out – either due to Corona illnesses, Corona measures and were cancelled with “Force Majeure” checked in the BM. As much as utilizing only 23% of the available funding is always frustrating we hope that actually carrying so many mobilities during those difficult times warrants positive recognition, particularly as we couldn’t employ our usual quality ensuring measures, particularly the accompaniment of flows by the school staff members (as the staff were banned from any business travel for a prolonged period) and therefore quality scores couldn’t be maintained at our usual levels. We nevertheless hope to gain recognition for the work we carried under the most challenging circumstances we have ever faced.