by Bahanur Nasya
The UCE LAB was designed by the 3 partner organisations with lots of international and local experience. They all do their best to help young citizens in organizing their skills and develop their own work. The project is designed in a way that non-formal education methods will be best modes of action and are the most promising approaches in work with youth, who are mostly not too keen on formal education or need the different approach to balance their other curricula. From beginning to end the partner organisations excerpt the knowledge, the experience from experts and themselves and the best practices. The partners identified three categories which can be most relevant for youngsters as placemaking, social entrepreneurship and social campaigning.
The partners decided to use a case description as methodology, which will allow an identification and deeper comprehension for beginners of social entrepreneurship. For this the partners identified several cases, from which the youngsters could learn best. The best cases are selected and distributed in three categories, which the partners found relevant. Those categories are
Placemaking
Social Entrepreneurship
Social Campaigning
Within the UCE LAB the partners identified the transferable knowledge of specific practice cases in Europe. They developed a comprehensive overview and content about those cases for young people. The aim of the case descriptions is to encourage them and give ideas how to develop own projects. The implementation of an entrepreneurship model includes educational approaches. That is the reason why we chose Placemaking as on own category, as the territorial aspect allows a proximity to youngsters and is perceived as hands on and tangible application of an idea. Since the physical space and its transformation can inspire and make visible, how little changes can affect society and the wellbeing, we tackle projects from this perspective in our project. The aim to develop skills among young people to embark a journey in social entrepreneurship is tackled in its own category. Next to what you do, whom you tell about it and who is with you is the most important factor to success. Therefore, we created an own category dealing with Social Campaigning.
The project development included, next to compilation of the content and learnings for youngsters, the two real LABs in Vienna and Berlin, with participants from the participating countries and several webinars that took place online to reach out a wider audience and document first-hand the approach and the experience of the invited experts. The two trainings, designed as LABs, the participants were able to have insights on projects themselves and gain important skills and knowledge to transfer into their own local context and field of work. In each of the LABs the partner organisations planned and performed sight visits, interviews, filming, content creation for the website and social media and many more activities with the participants. The used methodology combines non-formal, as well as political-democratic, social and entrepreneurial education approaches. These are used to enhance components of a comprehensive and progressive approach to entrepreneurship skills projected to the social issues of urban areas.
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