24 months of community-led academy multimedia content creation, publication and peer-to-peer communication. 4 times before deadlines online project writing challenges in order to help young people and youth organisations' teams to develop youth projects, apply within the Erasmus+ Youth programme and make a change in the world! At least 200 (50 at each deadline) participants of the challenges. 40 Teams private mentorship. According to 900 members' responses (now - over 2000, link is available upon request), we identified the needs & shaped them into the objectives of this project: • Equip community members with necessary tools, knowledge and skills for effective Erasmus+ Youth and ESC project management; • Create ideas for further cooperation and develop partnerships between organizations involved; • Involve young people and youth work professionals with fewer opportunities in international mobility projects; • Contribute to the quality improvement and acknowledgement of youth work and non-formal education in program and partner countries; • Develop non-formal education standards and methods in the participating organizations; • Be in the latest trends of the digitalisation and green practices, use less travel and do more online.
In January 2021 Life Zone (EE) and Synergy Bulgaria (BG) NGOs created an online community ‘Erasmus+ Youth Academy’ (youth.academy) focused on Erasmus+ Youth sector & ESC Programme. This community is designed for quality networking and experience sharing between NGO leaders, project managers, youth workers and youth leaders. At the moment it hosts over 2000 community members with a high engagement rate. It offers an international dimension and mainly addresses 2 problems: lack of education/training & mentoring for new/young NGOs which can aid their faster integration into E+ world and lack of quality networking (especially as a result of COVID lockdown, the time our community was launched) which is crucial for high-quality activities. To address these issues, we launched an online academy, a FB-community, internal mentoring support and a series of networking formats/events. Run voluntarily for 1 year we finally applied for a KA2 Small-scale grant and got the community funded.