"GREENday - Youth Entrepreneurship, Environmental Start-Ups" is a 24 month project aiming to tackle multiple challenges that youth faces today. First of all, it is a reply to the environmental concerns of climate change and pollution to which young people are reacting en-masse nowadays through movements like Fridays for Future or Extinction Rebellion. The second challenge is the one posed by youth unemployment in a financial and economic context which is globally on its way to transformation, assuming more ethical values, circular economy and green responsibility by the Green sector, as that is the growing demand from the customers and consumers. Therefore, our project aims to build and foster entrepreneurship competences in young people, starting from an entrepreneurial attitude, and apply it to solutions to today's environmental challenges and ecological concerns of youth across and beyond Europe. Fostering the creation of Green Start Ups among young people at a local level, by offering a 3-training cycle which will build on entrepreneurship, management and marketing competences, accompanied by local measures of meeting-feedback-networking confrontation with the local business sector, which also foresees a job-shadowing and internship period in like-minded enterprises for our beneficiaries; completed by participating in relevant green entrepreneurship business summits and networking meetings, as well as acting as local multipliers about the opportunities the EU provides in terms of employability and entrepreneurship to the fellow local youth. All that has been explained above will be accompanied and documented by online toolkits, portals, workbooks and videos aptly created for a wider public of young potential green entrepreneurs, and specifically for our direct beneficiaries, including an online green business catalogue, handbooks explaining what is green economy and a step-by-step introduction to green entrepreneurship, and marketing and PR measures on promoting one's own green company. In Conclusion GREENday - Youth Entreprenurship, Environmental Start-Ups is an active contribution to the 2027 Youth Goals: 1) Connecting EU with Youth - Our goal is to constantly put the accents of the European dimension of this project, especially on local initiatives. 2) Equality of All Genders - A strong focus will be placed on providing equal opportunities, and ensure gender equality throughout the project. 3) Inclusive Societies - Our target is that half of participants should be youths from marginalised backgrounds. 4) Information & Constructive Dialogue - Dialogue and cooperation will be fostered more than once within the project, specifically with the private sector and environmental movements. 5) Mental Health & Wellbeing - The project has a strong accent on attitude-building, working on both mindfulness and consciousness of youths as competent and confident entrepreneurs and spearheads of the change they want to see. 6) Moving Rural Youth Forward - More than half of this project's beneficiaries are youths with a rural background 7) Quality Employment for All - As we are in a historical phase of changing economic models and fostering a life-work balance, youth will be able to design their employment and enterprise around their needs and wants. 8) Quality Learning - In an inclusive fashion all learning opportunities provided will be done through non-formal education 9) Space and Participation for All - As our goal is to handover to our beneficiaries all the project results and empower them towards shared ownership of outcomes and outputs and especially facilitate the follow-up and expansion of this pilot project. 10) Sustainable Green Europe - We want to contribute to youth becoming the key actor in the economic transformation of Europe towards sustainability, reusability and environmentally friendly private sector. 11) Youth Organisations & European Programmes - As we will foster EU opportunities for young people across target groups and aim at becoming an incubator for youth initiatives and follow-up project at European level.
The objectives we wanted to achieve implementing the project were: 1) To foster attitudes and competences of young people to create their own Green Start-up enterprises, following through their realisation 2) To create a local and international support network around the young people's green business ideas that foster their implementation. 3) To create a pilot project that was easy to budget free create local replications and multiplication of the activities, with usability of the tools we created. 4) To digitalise tools and tailor them around the target group to allow reusability and sustainability of the long term perspectives 5) To provide visibility and disseminate EU opportunities for young people in the field of mobility, employability and entrepreneurship. 6) To foster a new entrepreneurial culture among young people which fosters environmental responsibility and sustainability
Employment in green economy sectors has increased a lot, employing 4.5 mln people. And numbers are rising. Concerning employability, enterprises in Italy employ up to 68% of the active workforce, in Greece over 80%, in Estonia 55%, in Hungary up to 53%, in Denmark up to 64%, according to Eurostat; the mentioned data showed us that there were grounds for initiatives. Youth unemployement in 2018 was decreasing by an average of 5% across all participating countries, meaning that the grounds was fertile to establish enterprises. According to statistics, green economy sector and environment appeared to be the top priority of EU and one of the main concern for teenagers and young. Therefore in this scenario we decided to apply for this project. The needs addressed were and are manifested by young striking for climate, demanding environmental justice, and the concerns that youth in Europe and beyond have and are manifesting about the environment.This project wanted to create a win-win scenario: promoting and sustaining the dedication to the cause, while fostering the creation of green start up enterprises, through an envisaged EU support system, made of community events, capacity building, networking and replication of the initiative.