According to the European Commission paper “Addressing youth unemployment in the EU” more than 5 million young people aged 15-24 are unemployed in the EU today. In light of the potential of entrepreneurs to create employment and sustainable growth, promoting youth entrepreneurship and making Europe more entrepreneur‑friendly has recently become a priority on the EU policy agenda. Fostering the right mind-set and entrepreneurship skills, as per the Europe 2020 strategy, can advance a European entrepreneurial culture in the young people, especially in the least developed EU regions, such as the participating ones from Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. In economically struggling regions, the social entrepreneurship model, which is close to people and to local communities, and primarily aimed at contributing to the general good of society, is the answer.DOVE will target youth unemployment by developing the Social Idea Stream (SIS) - a platform for young people to collaborate in the design and implementation of social entrepreneurship activities, fitting within the objectives of the partner organisations and their countries as it will build opportunities for young people to escape the unemployment vicious circle and to enter economic activity with social dimension. The project will transform young volunteers into active young social entrepreneurs, working in a collaborative and supportive environment. It will develop SIS as an open innovation model, based on current Information technologies best practices, configuring relations and supporting transactions needed to “collaboratively” create, realize, and capture creative youth solutions beyond the boundaries of a single organization. Project partners from Romania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Hungary, China and Argentina will adapt and deploy a Waterfall working methodology to design, develop and test SIS in a sequential development process, where progress flows steadily toward the final result (like a waterfall) through the phases of analysis, design, development, and testing. As a result we will:- Develop a system for young volunteers’ social ideas design and development as SIS;- Implement a youth exchange and youth workers mobilities;- Organize local campaigns in 6 different countries on 3 continents;- Train 30 young volunteers to participate in the youth exchange, work with the developed system and organize the project campaigns;- Have 1200 participants in the project campaigns;- Have 24 International participants in the project conferences outside the partners' consortiums and unlimited number of local and online ones;- Have 12 000 indirect participants informed by the printed material in both campaign rounds, 150 000 by social media and 600 000 by conventional media.
“The bare fields, the empty roads, the ruined houses and the shuttered schools say it all. Welcome to Bulgaria's rural northwest, officially the poorest region in the European Union.” The situation was not different in other European regions. In January 2015 the European Commission published a paper “Addressing youth unemployment in the EU” with the following main findings:-More than 5 million young people aged 15-24 were unemployed in the EU.-This represented an unemployment rate of 21.9% (23.7% in the euro area). This meant that more than one in five young Europeans on the labour market could not find a job. In Greece and Spain, it was even one in two.-More than 33% of unemployed people under 25 had been unemployed for more than a year in 2013.-7.5 million young Europeans between 15 and 24 were not employed, not in education and not in training (NEETs).-The young were at much greater risk in terms of precariousness and had been disproportionately hit by the crisis. In light of the potential of entrepreneurs to create employment and sustainable growth, promoting youth entrepreneurship and making Europe more entrepreneur‑friendly has recently become a priority on the EU policy agenda. However, research has shown that among young people the wish to become an entrepreneur, and their assessment of its feasibility, is lower in EU Member States than in comparable and emerging economies. Encouraging entrepreneurship is recognized at European level as particularly important to face challenges related to alarmingly high youth unemployment rates in most of the EU Member States. Entrepreneurship and self-employment are important pathways for young people to emerge from unemployment. In economically struggling regions, the social entrepreneurship model, which is close to people and to local communities, and primarily aimed at contributing to the general good of society, is the answer. Fostering the right mind-set and entrepreneurship skills, as per the Europe 2020 strategy, can advance a European entrepreneurial culture in the young people, especially in the least developed EU regions, such as the participating ones from Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. DOVE targeted youth unemployment by developing the Social Idea Stream (SIS) - a platform for young people to collaborate in the design and implementation of social entrepreneurship activities. SIS aligned the project partners' experience with the 2015 recommendation of the European Economic and Social Committee: “Entrepreneurship education needs to be considered, however, in the context of the overall social – and not just business – environment”.DOVE fitted within the objectives of the partner organisations and their countries as it built opportunities for young people to escape the unemployment vicious circle and to enter economic activity with social dimension.The cornerstone of developing of the DOVE project was to identify problems, faced commonly by young people from the partner organizations, and to develop and deliver suitable solutions. We focused on youth empowerment concept which will give the project the freedom to try novel approaches and test their transferability into the different partners’ cultural environments.In preparing the project proposal, the partners worked through several stages:1. Establish cooperation routine between the project partners’ innovation managers and youth work experts.2. Identify common issues and needs by the partners’ target group of young people.3. Identify ways for the project partners’ innovation managers and youth work experts to engage with the partners’ target group of young people.4. Develop and assess a modern concepts of intervention that can be delivered efficiently, recognising the personal needs, skills and abilities of the young people.5. Provide a pathway for external people and related organisations to help the target group engage with social entrepreneurship.