My Idea, My Future: Furthering social entrepreneurship in rural area

Do you live in a rural area?

Does your region suffer from high unemployment or only few interesting job opportunities are in the market?

Do you have your own entrepreneurial ideas and want to put them into practice? Then keep on reading, our project may help you realize your dream and build your future!

My Idea, My Future project aims to improve the situation of young people in rural areas introducing the concept of social entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurship represents an economic approach based on sustainability and characterized by resistance to market shocks, a great potential for social integration and employment and its perfect adaptability to local-specific challenges.

Social enterprises cover a wide range of activities: usually welfare, health and social care or environmental and eco-system protection. On that account, many local and regional challenges could be tackled. Consequently, encouraging young people to develop and realize their entrepreneurial ideas by supporting them to launch into social entrepreneurship could help reducing youth unemployment and improve future life of (not only) young people in rural areas.

In order to promote social entrepreneurship within young people, My Idea, My Future project will:

• create a Living Lab to provide support in the creation and development of socio-entrepreneurial ideas, to inform about, and to strengthen education in the field of social entrepreneurship;
• host non-formal workshops for young people in each partner country regarding entrepreneurship and the development of rural areas;
• organize a Festival of Social Entrepreneurship in Slovenia in April 2018, which consists of an international conference and a marketplace, where young people from different countries will have the chance meet different stakeholders as well as successful and inspiring young social entrepreneurs.

At their second meeting in Palermo (Italy) on 25^th October 2017, the project partners discussed the national research on social entrepreneurship completed in previous months, and planned the next steps to be taken, including development of a manual and mobile app guiding users through the first steps toward social entrepreneurship.

My Idea, My Future – Furthering social entrepreneurship in rural area is funded by  Key Action 2: Co-operation for Innovation and the Exchange of Good Practices – Strategic Partnership in the field of YOUTH.

The project partnership holds together 3 organisations:

• RIS (Slovenia, Coordinator);
• ADICE – Association pour le Developpement des Initiatives Citoyennes et Europeennes (France);
• CESIE (Italy).

If you wish to learn more about the project or are interested in participating in either the workshop or the Festival of Social Entrepreneurship, please contact Cecilie Grusova: cecilie.grusova@cesie.org.