OTBT challenges women to take up a transformative journey at their home and across Europe by investing in their empowerment and co-creating opportunities for their career and improving their life-work balance. Women involved have been encouraged to contribute to support local economies thanks to their ideas and sustainable choices through peer-mentoring, informal learning, and substantial deployment of digital tools helpful to foster communication, promotion, storytelling, and networking which have been achieved by defining an ad hoc project novel methodology, by assembling a facilitator handbook, by facilitating a microlearning programme in the different partner countries, by being inspired and inspiring by female changemakers, by building a self-assessment tool; by organizing mentoring circles. The main OTBT Project objective strives to achieve a long-term hub and community for women working in tourism and CCSs or interested to make a career in these fields, whether they want to access networking and learning opportunities, testing out a business idea to be further crowdfunded, or co-develop a new collaborative project by accessing EU/regional/national funds.
OTBT Project partners have applied for this project to empower and improve the employability of adult women (30+ years) who are at risk of losing or have lost their jobs and incomes due to the Covid-19 by exploring the cross innovation between tourism, sustainable development, and creativity. By building on informal learning and mentoring, OTBT Project has addressed the following needs: promoting networking; inspiring and fostering empathy among women of different backgrounds, ages, geographies and cultures; empowering and inspiring the most vulnerable and disadvantaged women through changemakers life and work in order to better face uncertainties about their future; motivating women in engaging in sustainable development through creativity, problem solving and resilience, along with enhanced digital competence; co-creating and further managing a digital forward-looking learning Academy, as a women community and hub of resources, information, tools and contacts for skilled females who commit and work together to other projects, including new social enterprises, to advance long-term goals and drive long-term change related to sustainable development and creative and inclusive urban regeneration of European destinations.