"What motivates young people - especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds - to undertake their own entrepreneurial initiatives? How this motivation may be awaken and supported? How to empower them and help in facing challenges? What do young entrepreneurs experience, what they learn by setting up and maintaining their initiatives?The aim of the SPARKCATCHER - education for entrepreneurial innovation project"" was to create educational tools as well as to collect research results that will help- both young people from challenging backgrounds, as well as youth workers and educators - to start and develop their entrepreneurial initiatives, also in the the area of social entrepreneurship. This project was realised by the Arte Ego Foundation from Łódź, Poland in partnership with German organisation NaturKultur e.V. involving eight other organisations from various countries and sectors: University of Zielona Góra (Poland), Słyszę Serce (Poland), MOB (Germany), Westflugel (Germany), Ocean Znanja (Croatia) SOS Detsko Selo (Macedonia) Hellenic Youth Participation (Greece) Kal Youth Center (Luxembourg). In order to reach our aims, we created the innovative curriculum consisting of two main parts:SPARK (start it up)- a set of pedagogical complementary tools and methods empowering young people in starting up their own initiative: http://sparkcatcher.eu/spark/CATCHER (Sustain your start-up)- compendium of research results, interactive links and empowering entrepreneurial stories supporting youth in maintaining their entrepreneurial initiatives: http://sparkcatcher.eu/catcher/To create SPARK set of tools, we involved in-depth analysis of experts (youth workers, coaches, academic teachers, art therapists and artists) to design methods stimulating and re-discovering a purpose of life. How to become “unstuck”, starting from the moment in the life of total confusion to the stage of doubts or just lack of motivation: ""Awakening through stories” (for those who suffered difficult moments in their lives and needed to „rename” the future); ""Awakening through visual process” (for young people who lost motivation, power or feel insecure or not visible enough); ""Body|mind|connection"" (for everybody whose body is stiff and needs an impulse through movement); ""One week journal"" which was designed a complementary method for youth workers helping them to maintain their balance in life and thus preventing the burning out process which occurs really often while working with youth.All the methods were were tested by youth workers working with young people from challenging backgrounds (50 participants in total). The results were shared in two forms – using Sparkcatcher on-line platform as well as in the form of PDF publication.For the “CATCHER” part, we conducted international research among young entrepreneurs and youth workers in the area of social inclusion (including NEET group) and social entrepreneurship consisting on survey, in-depth interviews (documented in the form of empowering articles and movies) as well as exploration of interactive resources. We managed to get 79 comprehensively filled in questionnaires and 24 in-depth interviews. The outcomes of the research - separately from the perspective of a youth worker and a youth entrepreneur- were presented at our webpage as well as as PDF publication. The compendium consist of 3 main components: 1. research study report analysing the experience of 34 youth entrepreneurs and 69 youth workers supporting youth in creating and maintaining their start-ups from 12 countries and containing links to interactive resources and institutions supporting youth in their initiatives.2. Mapping the entrepreneurial path + country study results 3. Empowering stories of youth entrepreneurs in the form of movies and interviews, such as a young mother who co-founded a forest kindergarten or the founders of marketing agency for people with quadriplegia”I stay in bed and I work” and „Greek Geek” .In the frame of the project we organised also one multiplier event which was a webinar targeting youth workers, trainers, academic teachers, etc. We had 172 participants registered for our webinar and 45 actively took part in it. All the people who registered for the webinar were provided with its recording.We have already been invited to use the results in new contexts and in the future projects as both the methods and research are found very innovative and useful by the NGOs and public institutions in Poland and Germany. We have been constantly disseminating the results of our project as we believe that a lot still may be done in the area of inclusion and entrepreneurship, especially social entrepreneurship. We are motivated to make use of our tools and research outcomes and to create new educational partnerships, as our research has demonstrated that this is one of the most needed and effective ways to empower and support young potential entrepreneurs from challenging backgrounds."

"Our project aims to stimulate and boost educational dimension of public spaces. We believe in power of nonformal education, which can easily ""sneak"" into everyday life of every young person, regardless of privileges, nationality or competences. Public space is the natural enviroment for learning, which has become more and more an desert which need to be recultivated with meaningful activities and a focus on stimulating development of young people. Our project is aiming to create this shift in understanding the public space as a learning space, from the perspective of the youth worker and from the perspective of the young people, with a strong forcus on younth with fewer opportunities. We want to collect though a reseach phase an theoretical understanding which will show how to transform successfully public space into learning space. This will be done in cooperation with the University Potsdam to have a dialogue with the formal educational sector and build this study on solid theoretical ground, to foster cross sectoral cooperation. The outcomes will lead to create a practical tookit, with methods and approaches which will help to make for the youth work field a supportive guidence how to empower this learning experiences in the public space. This will be created based on a practical test phase where the methods will be put into action within activites conduct by the partners. The outcomes will be presented to the wider community of youth workers and stimulate the development of a network of multiplyers which will continue to work on the common ground transforming with their activites public space into learning space. What will lead to a wide spreaded inspiration for the field towards a biggers awareness on th epotential of public space as learning enviroment. And through the network dimension forster longterm cooperation and common project development in this field. In general we aim to stimulate a wider systematic shift of awareness which will lead to more awareness how to use the public space as an enviroment for learning and to unfold the potential of cross sectoral cooperation to create activities which will stimulate young people development in that context. As we have seen in the last years how big is the motivation in reclaiming the public space towards protesting and expressing the personal and politicalopinion, the next step could be to understand it as a ground to learn together and grow. This will recall a old tradition of the Agora - the public, common space as a enviroment to come together and learn from each other as it was in the Antique."

"Young people are not thought to communicate with others. They do not know how to listen to others and to themselves and how to express their opinions and needs without judgment, criticism, and violence. That often leads to aggression and suicide attempts.The objectives of this project are the following:1. To support youth in acquiring and developing basic competencies: an ability to identify, understand, express, interpret and reflect upon own feelings and needs, and to work with others in an empathetic and solution-oriented way.2. To support educators and youth workers by equipping them with an innovative and complementary to other methods tool, enabling themto reach out especially young people who have problems with self-expression and self-reflection in a field of emotions, needs, and future planning. This project will be run transnationally because of its core quality aspect which is a multicultural expression, by incorporating diverse symbols and esthetic coming from different cultures and minority groups. Activities that we planned: 1) Transnational Project Meeting during which we will make final preparation for the whole project and strengthen cooperation between Partners. 2) The research - collecting images representing feelings and needs of young people from different social and cultural backgrounds during workshops, online and offline campaigns. We will also do analyses of most actual resources on a topic of the project across Europe (books, articles in specialized magazines, videos, etc.). 3) Test phase to make sure that our tool will fit young people. 4) Creating The Colors of Feelings and Needs"" - 160 illustrations in printable formats (jpg and pdf.) ready to download on the website and the Manual for youth workers. 5) Mini-congress (multiplier event) to share the outcomes of research and show know-how for “The Colors of Feelings and Needs” deck. During the research phase, we will involve directly minimum 40 young people from Poland and Germany from different areas being in danger of social exclusion (mental health, neurological disabilities, and refugees). We will also approach the min. 100 young people through social media and in public spaces.During the test phase min. 16 young people (8 per country) will take part in the workshops. We also plan mini-congress (multiplier event) - the invitations will be sent to min. 100 youth organizations, schools, and higher education institutions and we will invite 20 experienced youth workers and educators from Poland and Germany. The Colors of Feelings and Needs will empower young people through helping them to name their feelings and needs (making them more self-aware) and empathize with other people’s feelings and needs, showing them how they can take their life in their own hands and take responsibility for fulfilling own needs through different strategies by changing communication patterns. Thanks to that they will develop respect and compassion. Youth workers will gain an innovative and easy to use tool to work with youth - using visual arts and metaphor as a powerful way of nonverbal communication.Nonviolent Communication becomes a crucial element in work with a youth work. It focuses mainly on the communication aspect within a person and with people, and the main tool to reach the outcomes are words. However, while working with young people using words and intellect is not the most efficient way of reaching them and helping to open up and express. That is why we decided to combine nonverbal communication and visual tools with Nonviolent Communication approach. We want to help youth to get to know themselves better and express themselves in an open, noninvasive way. We want to encourage new generations to connect with other people through empathy, acceptance, and openness for diversity - working through cards will create a safe and powerful environment, where young people will not be judged or criticized and youth workers and educators will get attractive, innovative and easy to use the tool. Cards will be suitable for all cultures and languages, so it could be used all over Europe.We hope that this tool will cause more workshops addressing youths based on feelings and needs in the are of formal and nonformal education. We believe to form a community of practice, where nonverbal communication will equally accompany the verbal one."

"Clothing and design style play one of the most important roles in young people's lives. The way young people dress becomes part of their identity and the way they are perceived by the others. On the other hand, the question what exactly young people express through their clothes and how is it related to their self-esteem and self-perception remains open. Young people, especially those with disadvantaged backgrounds, are often unaware of their needs and passions or believe that they are not able or skilled to express themselves by their personally crafted clothes. Thus, the main idea of this project was to explore if and how it is possible through cloth design process enter young people personal sphere to reveal they talents, passions and competences in order to use them as resource in further social and professional pro-activity. To do so we created an innovative educational model stimulating self-awareness of young people and entrepreneurship through cloth design called Design Yourself Educational Model (DYEM). This educational tool is openly accessible to the youth workers, trainers, teachers and counselors as it takes the perspective both the learner (for young people) and master (for youth workers and educators). It contains both the manual how to make research and how to create a learning environment in the area of self-expression of young people as well as presents our practice offering also the online space for follow up, feedback and new ideas.Another objective was a research study on youth pro-activity in clothing design and craft that was conducted both in Poland and in Germany. The research consisted of qualitative and a quantitative phase, the latter founding on the prior. The outcomes from both phases in Poland and in Germany were the basis for the content of practical phase of the project: coaching support, online support (in the form of online learning paths) and craft workshops. The research proved that clothing is important for most of young people and that developing own style consists of different methods, starting with easy things (as adding decorations or gluing something) or more complicated ways like sewing completely new clothes. The data has shown that young people interested in self-expression through their own style very often find ways to do so, regardless of lack of finances or access to machines. However, the study had also demonstrated that the idea of what and how to express oneself is crucial in this process. Linking this outcome with education and youth work it seems important to support young people in discovering and developing their own ideas for self-expression through personal or online support, such as learning paths that we have created and inserted on the Design Yourself project's web page. The importance of having an idea goes in line with the research results focusing on factors that encourage young people to manual self-expression, in which personal support was indicated the most. The data also shows that many young people are interested in expressing themselves through their style but either feel little talented or lack ideas. Moreover, the study revealed that young people both in Germany and in Poland while wearing things created on their own feel positive with the surrounding world as well as with themselves: they feel stronger, more confident or more secure. As for the proactivity of young people different aspects became visible during this research. There seems to be a difference between proactivity of people expressing themselves manually and those who don’t express themselves manually. However, this difference is not as clear cut as it was imagined to be at the start of this research. The analyses of proactivity for both German and Polish data show that most respondents are proactive or show this potential.We also constructed ""DesignYourself"" online platform as an interactive space for young people who are creative in redesigning own cloths and want to become proactive it that area as well as for handmakers, fashion designers , youth workers and trainers interested in a topic and new methology.To realize these objectives we created the partnership consisting of two partnership organizations: Arte Ego from Łódź experienced in international and local projects addressed to young people using different art media: circus, sound system, visual art and street work, and its German partner GrenzKultur gGmbH/ Kabuwazi from Berlin providing children and youth with the help in building up needed social skills mainly through the methods of circus. The project was realized with the support of the post-psychiatric hospital youth centre ""Imbryk"" and the network of designers and companies involved in the design of clothing, tailoring and creating accessories. The group of 16 young participants (including 5 persons with fewer opportunities) took part in pilot workshops being part of DYEM elaboration process."

<< Objectives >>With this project, we aim to increase literacy and digital skills of primary education pupils by using European Heritage as a mean of learning with the creation of stories and ebooks. By that, we also aim to increase cultural awareness of pupils and teachers. Finally, this project has the objective to foster digital skills and experience of teachers by giving them the tools to implement it into classrooms.<< Implementation >>To reach those objectives, we will implement different activities which will led to the creation of 3 guides: •Heritage as gateway for developing skills will be an introduction guide for education professionals •A creation guide which will explain how to create city tour stories and how to shape them digitally as well as 4 story examples•A white paper which will gather the feedbacks from the testing phase to adapt the creation guide.<< Results >>To allow partners to reach the 3 guides creation, different steps will be implemented: in each activity, all partners will supervise and disseminate the project, they will think about a framework to design the different guides, create the content together, review it and translate it in all partnership languages. In the second activity, partners will organise a testing phase for the creation guide which will be the base for the white paper conception.