Youth unemployment remains on an upwards trajectory across Europe. However, at the same time, young people are innovating and have strong motivation to create new markets and jobs. At a critical point for Europe, The Cultural & Social Youth Entrepreneurship (CASYE) project brings together a strategic partnership of four organisations from the UK, Belgium, Italy and Spain to address a number of sectorial and horizontal priorities for Erasmus. CASYE aims to develop innovative, CPD accredited tools to support marginalised young people in becoming entrepreneurs in the social and cultural sectors through the capacity building and certification of youth workers and other professionals by giving them new approaches to support and strengthen their work, improve their skills, and increase the quality of their interventions. We also know that "culture" is the fourth pillar of sustainable development, but not everyone can currently access this kind of knowledge for personal fulfilment. European talents should be able to have more opportunities through activities that are socio-economically diverse and inclusive. CASYE responds to this need by supporting youth entrepreneurship in the creative sector through the development and piloting a social economy model, with an emphasis on empowering young people with fewer opportunities (social obstacles, geographical obstacles and/or economic obstacles). To this end, CASYE will create a mentoring, CPD accredited programme for youth organisations and youth workers working directly with young people with fewer opportunities and who wish to become entrepreneurs in the social or cultural sectors. Through the CASYE programme, the development of a sustainable ecosystem in supporting youth entrepreneurs in the creative European cultural and social sectors will be guaranteed. Given the powerful influence of technology and virtual media on the young, especially adolescent population, it is important to develop methodologies that are adapted to the current situations they are living. The effectiveness of youth work methodologies and tools are closely related to the ability to motivate the recipient and promote their participation in the proposed activities. CASYE aims to help youth workers reach young audiences who have hunger for social and cultural entrepreneurship through actions that are widely followed by youth, and which directly and indirectly influence them and their behaviour. Our project will empower youth workers to upgrade their current work with young people, while also validating this new knowledge through the provision of Continuous Professional Development (CPD) Certificates. CASYE will create and pilot an innovative e-toolkit to promote social entrepreneurship competences among young people . This will allow them to turn their creative ideas and solutions to current social problems into entrepreneurial projects. It is worth nothing, that CASYE itself will be run as a social entrepreneurship youth project by adopting a youth-led structured for its management and evaluation. Through the CASYE Youth Advisory Board, young entrepreneurs from all participating countries will quality control the project while also allowing the creation and selection of several potential business ideas in the sector of creative cultural industries. The young entrepreneurs who will be submitting them will be guided through the mentoring programme, using the CASYE model. This will not only lead to the piloting of the CASYE mentoring programme, but also the actual creation of new, youth-led businesses in the participating countries. We will use these examples to allow others to replicate them using the CASYE paradigm, while also sharing the learning from the CASYE results as a youth-led programme. In summary, the project will product and pilot 3 Intellectual Outputs: 1. The CASYE Mentoring Model Programme for youth workers 2. The CASYE Outreach Support Toolkit 3. CASYE Implementation Handbook. It will hold three national open days and one international closing conference (multipliers) reaching at least 190 delegates. All multipliers will be CPD accredited. The project will be quality controlled and monitored through a Youth Scrutiny Panel, generating over 100 high quality volunteering opportunities that will be certified with YouthPass. Two CPD accredited Learning Teaching Training events have also been planned: 1. Short-term joint staff training event with 12 delegates 2. Blended mobility of young people with 12 delegates. It is expected that through the project's tailored communication and dissemination strategy over 20,000 individuals will be reached, while the publication of some of the IOs through the coordinator's publishing arm IARS Publications will reach 180,000 institutions from around the world.
The objectives we wanted to achieve, especially in the long term, were as follows: 1. Raising awareness about the positive social impact that social enterprises in the CCIs have on the society as well as the opportunities they offer to young people. 2. Implement research activities on the state of the art and learn more about what already exists. 3. Develop learning materials for both professionals and young people, to support the development of young social entrepreneurship in the CCIs field. 4. Involve and interact with a wide set of stakeholders (from CCIs, social economy and education field), ranging from young people, entrepreneurs, organisations, educators, policy makers, etc. 5. Explore the link and opportunities offered in the last two year about the New European Bauhaus and link with the topics of the project. 6. Provide young entrepreneurs in the aforementioned sectors with a sustainable ecosystem of support that they can count on once they decide to embark on the adventure of social entrepreneurship. 7. Develop youth work methodologies and tools adapted to the current situations experienced by young people. 8. Show youth workers the importance of updating their work with young people and thus be able to offer them different alternatives and career opportunities to build their future.
Youth unemployment remains on an upwards trajectory across Europe. However, at the same time, young people are innovating and have strong motivation to create new markets and jobs. Youth is still suffering the effects of the economic crisis and COVID, the Ukrainian war and Brexit have not made it easier for young people. In 2021, the EU youth unemployment rate was 13.0 %. The creative cultural industries (CCIs) play an important role in fostering job creation, economic growth and innovation and have been identified by the European Commission as a resilient sector in times of economic crisis. Moreover, the traditional educational model is not designed to encourage entrepreneurship as a possible employment opportunity. This motivated us to create a project that would promote social entrepreneurship skills among young people and help them transform their ideas and creative solutions to current social problems into entrepreneurial projects, to show them that they can make a future for themselves independently, and that they can do so while solving social problems in their community and promoting culture.