Disadvantaged adult learners like migrants, other minorities, early school leavers and women face a significant gap between the quantity and quality of their life related and occupationally relevant knowledge and competences they have and their lack of corresponding qualifications that are valued in education and on the labour market. This pertains to outcomes of prior and current learning in informal and non-formal contexts, as well as formal qualifications acquired outside of the EU territory. Our experience is that especially for disadvantaged learners in adult learning, access to validation that would translate their competences into an increased employability and social inclusion is still lacking.One background is that despite EU-wide advances in validation of learning, there is not yet a coherent approach across or within EU member states, but a lose mix of diverse, sometimes contradicting policies, structures and practices. Adult education has also not been a focus sector, and its validation relevant links to other validation stakeholders have yet to be better established to provide meaningful avenues to formal education and labour market insertion. This poses a challenge especially for small and middle scale adult education providers to identify and implement best practices in validation, including in relation to linkages to other education sectors. This would be a prerequisite for their learners to have access to adequate validation. There also is a discrepancy between the heterogeneity of work related competences held by our learners and validation procedures and practices that are often based on more customary standards of skills and knowledge. This applies especially to the stages of assessment and certification in validation procedures that lead to alternative qualifications taken seriously by employers or that lead to further vocational or higher education. Other problems are the use of assessment methods like written tests that for disadvantaged learners can be unnecessarily challenging. The European Qualifications Framework and corresponding portfolio approaches like Europass CV provide a better correspondence with our learners’ competences, but are underutilised. All this results in an undervaluing and further dis-qualification of disadvantaged learners rather than an adequate appraisal of their competences.The partnership has comprised the following organisations: uniT - Verein für Kultur an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz (Austria), Associació Catalana de Formació Polivalent Aplicada, Baobab (Spain), Associazione ALPHA (Italy) and the Landesarbeitsgemeinschaft für politisch-kulturelle Bildung in Brandenburg e.V. (Germany).As adult learning providers continuously working with different groups of disadvantaged adult learners, our interest in this partnership was to contribute to improving the access of disadvantaged learners to an adequate validation that translates their individually and economically significant informal, non-formal and foreign formal learning outcomes into qualifications improving their social inclusion. To sharpen and narrow the broad target group of disadvantaged learners we focussed on migrants and refugees - the politically most discussed group of disadvantaged learners over Europe in the last years. But we are definitely sure that a lot of the insights, tools and ideas we developped in the project are also useful for the validation of all the groups of disadvantaged learners. The specific objectives of this project were to a) identify, exchange and test best practices in validation of competences of disadvantaged adult learners, including in relation to linkages to relevant public, private and third sector actors b) identify procedures to systematically incorporate and mainstream best practices in validation in the educational practices of our and similar organisations; c) design and test training courses for adult educators working with disadvantaged learners in order to facilitate their use of and provide guidance on validation in their educational activities incorporating the standards and best practices; d) disseminate intellectual outputs, trainings and training materials to other public, private and third sector adult education providers; e) disseminate recommendations with a special focus on the validation needs of disadvantaged adult learners to inform relevant stakeholders, including in policy making.The main outputs of the project are 1) Report on current validation practices to establish informal and non-formal acquired competences in Austria, Germany, Spain and Italy including good-practice examples.2) Recommendations for improving the process of validation of prior learning in Europe (en)3) Recommendations for improving the process of validation of prior learning in Spain, Germany, Italy and Austria4) Toolkit: Methods of validation of prior learning5) Building up a professional community on Epale and on the blog of our websiteQE

Our motivation for applying to Erasmus+ for funds to develop the Europe Alive project was the worry that young European Citizens feel increasingly distant from the EU democratic processes, and that learning about the EU in the Social Sciences has low interest with students in many European countries, including Denmark, Germany and The Netherlands. Our overall objective was to develop an innovative role playing game as well as surrounding teaching materials that would give secondary level students a) better knowledge of the EU law-making process, b) higher motivation for learning more about the EU and higher interest in EU politics, and c) practice in debating, negotiating and taking a political stance. We believe we have achieved this by developing a hybrid: a digital role play that ties in with traditional classroom education and which facilitates extensive interpersonal contact between student participants. We have reached 52 teachers and 886 secondary level students within our project period. Europe Alive has the potential to reach many more, but was severely struck by Covid-19 restrictions. The main activities of the Europe Alive project have been:Intellectual Output 1:- Defining the intended learning outcomes and didactical framework- Anchoring teaching contents in the national Social Sciences curricula of the partner countries- Drafting Factsheet 1 & 2- Drafting the follow-up module- Involving teachers and students in quality checking the IO1Intellectual Output 2:- Drafting Storyboard 1-5- Graphic design- Role play design- Programming the digital platform- Evaluating and quality checking the digital platformDissemination and Evaluation:- Participation at online workshops- Seeking partnerships with key actors in all three partner countries- ‘Minimum viable product’ test- Evaluation 1 of pilot test- Evaluation 2 of the DK multiplier event & teacher onboardingIn addition, numerous activities regarding partner communication and project management will be described further in the coming report. Many participating students reported gaining higher understanding as well as interest in the EU and politics at the European level. Many participating teachers agreed that Europe Alive succeeds in teaching difficult EU-curricula while fostering political awareness in the students. We believe that Europe Alive has the potential to invoke a sense of ownership and engagement in the European Union for the participating students.

"The age structure of the European population is changing rapidly and radically in the balance between the number of younger and older people. In the same time, we notice the problem of discrimination of seniors and exclude them from social life. Therefore, there is a need to rethink and recognize the role of older people and their important, yet often invisible, contributions to the local community. In our opinion, one of the ways to overcome the obstacles that prevent older people from remaining active in society and local life is encouraging and support adult people over to be community leaders.Effective community leadership is an important contributor to local social development. Civil society organizations such as community groups, voluntary organizations, charities, and community co-operatives, are taking a lot of actions to prepare their communities for modern life. Community leaders, therefore, are an important part of their communities. A community leader is someone who is perceived to represent the community’s interests and plays the role of protecting them. Community leaders have a vast range of roles that range from mobilizing communities for a common cause of designing courses of action to overcome common challenges. Community leadership work means also building a succession plan to keep the community strong as you move forward into the future.The local community leaders are also necessary to make any positive changes in the local communities. They are an integral part of their community. They are “in the middle” and because of that, they know what exactly is needed, what are the opportunities, resources, but also weaknesses of their community. It is impossible to start any permanent change in the community if there is no leader, so it is also important to provide for potential and existing leaders opportunities for their own personal development, for the growth of knowledge. There is also needed a space to exchange experiences and to get inspired. We think that mentoring can be the way to support experienced community leaders and encourage potential ones. It can be an opportunity to exchange knowledge, ideas and good practices. It can also be a great source of motivation, which plays a key role in making positive changes in the community. – It would not be possible to take any action and involve other people without it. Mentoring between local community leaders has great potential also because of the coordination of goals - there is no competition here, knowledge can be passed without fear because the main goal for both sides is the development of the local communities. The aim of our project is the encouragement to improve community development and increase the number of local leaders prepared to contribute to the local community development by:- providing training for the future and current community leaders over 50 to increase their knowledge and skills,- promoting the emergence of new community leaders through mentoring, - sharing experience, best practice and active networking between the community leaders.That is what we are aiming to achieve:- to prepare the model of mentoring between community leaders;- to prepare the training for local community leaders, including the leaders’ mentors and future leaders of local communities;- to organize the mentoring for new community leaders.The products of our project are two Intellectual Outputs:1. The Handbook and Guide: How to be a leader of the local community.2. The Training Modules and the Training Kit: the training for the local community leaders.In the project, we also foresee the training for trainers from partner institutions to test and embed the elaborated training method and ensure the efficient implementation of its testing phase in partner countries locally.The project will be disseminated in various ways: dissemination events, website, social networks, promotional materials, etc. on all levels, from local to international.The project partnership is composed of seven partners:KCZIA – Krakowskie Centrum Zarzadzania i Administracji Sp. z o.o. – Poland (Krakow) – Coordinator,MC2020 – MEDIA CREATIVA 2020, S.L. – Spain (Bilbao) – training institution for adults,ISCTE-IUL – INSTITUTO UNIVERSITARIO DE LISBOA – Portugal (Lisboa) – University,In Progress – Associazione ""In Progress"" Calabria – NGO from Italy (Vibo Valentia),LAG – Landesarbeitsgemeinschaft für politisch-kulturelle Bildung in Brandenburg e.V. – NGO from Germany (Potsdam) ,BIMEC – Bimec Ltd. – Bulgaria (Sofia) – training institution for adults,LABSTEM – Ergastiri STEM – NGO from Greece (Lamia)."