ALTERNATIVA – the power of community through  social entrepreneurship

2019-2022

Through an innovative approach of social entrepreneurship, the project responded to two of the main
challenges of Europe: employment and social inclusion.
The “ALTERNATIVA – the power of community through social entrepreneurship” project aimed to
enable adults to acquire and develop skills and competencies needed for their employability, to turn
their business ideas into concrete actions while also caring for the environmental sustainability and
their compromise with the community. The idea was to empower adults through the exchange of
experiences, in order to gain an opportunity to learn about different ways of self-employment, working
for a social business and various options of innovative social entrepreneurship.
The ALTERNATIVA project was focused on people who have to face the main challenges of the today
economic world such as unemployment, economic instability, seniors 50+, women, adults from
disadvantaged areas or with special needs.

 The Objectives

  • To foster a common understanding of the social entrepreneurship field by exploring different concepts, formats and models of social entrepreneurship (social enterprises, cooperatives, social economy vs solidarity economy etc.);
  • To facilitate the transfer of good practices and social enterprise ideas, strengthen the community spirit and increase the motivation for participation in the society by creating a collection of existing local social entrepreneurship initiatives from each country;
  • To increase educators and trainers competences in the adult education in the field of social economy and development of the potential of partner organizations in the area of transnational cooperation and the initiation of social enterprises;
  • To develop entrepreneurship abilities to identify resources and business opportunities within the local community and valorise the cultural, social and environmental heritage, as well as basic and transversal competences of 48 adults (on average 12/country ) during the training workshops organized in each partner country to share good practices in social economy form partners countries;
  • To share good practices and ideas about social economy initiatives in communities and create a manual of good practices.

Coordinator

Osrodek Wspierania Organizacji Pozarzadowych, Bialystok,  Poland

Partners

  • CONSORCI DE LA RIBERA Spain
  • SYNTHESIS CENTER FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION LIMITED, Nicosia,  Cyprus
  • Asociatia EDUNET, Craiova, Romania

Main results 

  • A collection of successful social entrepreneurship initiatives from all partner countries;
  • A manual of good practices, social business ideas and information of legal and social conditions for creating social enterprises, activating people from disadvantaged groups within them and analyzing factors affecting the success of these entities;
  • A Facebook profile with information of local/regional social business initiatives from each partner country. The profile will serve for increasing the visibility of social entrepreneurship;
  • A training methodology that will be used to support adults from disadvantaged groups in learning about social economy.
  • Training workshops delivered in each partner country in order to share examples of good practices and to increase of motivation of people from disadvantaged groups .

Download

Good Practices Manual ” Social Economy in Cyprus, Poland,Romania and Spain”
The manual is a collection of successful social businesses from 4 partner countries. It includes also the
suggestions and recommendations concerning conducting workshops on Social Economy for people
from disadvantaged groups.

Erasmus This project was funded with the support of the European Commission under the Erasmus +Program  –  Strategic Partnerships in Adult Education.