The applicant taking experience from the “Museum Mediator”, an Empowering programme in the field of art and culture has decided to create a project in which the past experience could be improved and shared. The partnership put into place has been composed of organisations active in the field of art and culture and in the development of empowerment courses and pathways to facilitate learning, empower and employability. The main aim of the project was to work together in order to achieve transparency and recognition of the non-formal skills and qualifications having analysed the variety of pedagogy, methodology and validation systems used. The proposal was built taking in consideration the “Museum Mediator” experience and the UK approach to student-centred learning and work-based learning offering in this way an innovative pedagogical approach to the partner’s organisations. In this way the project has addressed the priority of providing empowerment, promote the use of the work-based technique and provide an occasion to all society groups to keep learning and obtaining a qualification. We have worked together to bring in good/better practices, improve the materials of the Empowering programme and standardise it, with inputs from 6 partners representing 4 EU countries (Italy, Romania, UK and Spain). We are all seeking to enhance the “boost to empowerment” through art and culture to train entrepreneurial skills for IVET students. We wanted to collaborate to design the most appropriate curriculum and pedagogy, using the knowledge and experience of all partners. We acknowledge the different pedagogical approaches of partners/nations, yet also seek to be uniform in our approach.The project has helped strengthen the knowledge, competences and skills of 57 participants who work as trainers or curriculum developers within the partner’s organisation. The objective was to provide them with new and improved skills that would then be used to create new pathways within art and culture to empower young marginalised people, NEETs and unemployed, tackling in this way some of the major issues present in EU. The participants have also better understood the use and value of Europass, ECVET and EQF. The main target groups addressed are: staff of the partner organisations (teacher/trainers/curriculum developer), which will benefit directly from the developments of the project and consequently their target group which is NEETs, Minority groups and students which have shown interest on an empowerment programme.The empowering programme that we desired to share, improve and standardise is based on an empirical approach, offering immediate solutions in work-based learning and to help beneficiaries into active citizenship and consequently into sustainable employment. The partnership has created a creative and innovative activity called “Selfie Hunt” which can be integrated in the empowering courses offering the future participant a new way of acquiring skills and competences. The impact has been the development of a common curriculum which we all own – both as intellectual property and “own” in terms of our commitment to its quality delivery. The project has built and strengthened networks of European providers, enabling them to deliver a standardised empowering through art and culture curriculum, build organisational capacity and collaboratively (there has been further 2 projects created in the KA2 Youth sector/Vet), work towards achieving results that tackle EU's 2020 Strategy and foster CVET learning within the trainers/teachers and create a standardized format of training IVET students to empower them with art and culture (Selfie Hunt Empowement project which develops digital and soft skills).The overall project activities have been broken down into three stage plans representing the collection of collaborative work actions necessary for the achievement of the projected results & outcomes:*1st stage: Preparation & creation of templates, review existing materials, identifying of 4 key to create a useful empowering programme: 1.Team-Building & work2.Problem Solving & Creative thinking3.Student based learning methodology4.Work-based methodology*2nd stage: Improvement phase - Each partner has selected one of the topics which have then been explored and have created guidelines to improve our empowerment courses; *3rd stage: Production of exploration of routes to ECVET certification – identification and selection of ECVET learning outcomes. The identified 4 topics have been explored, the results, skill, competences & knowledge for them were identified in order to create a successful empowerment programme. Our transnational meetings coincided with the deadlines set for the project activities and were vital to complete the project.

"CONTEXT: Museums contain the most precious accumulations of human societies, all over the world. According to the last definition adopted by ICOM (2007, Vienna), ""a museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment"". Although nowadays education occupies the first position in the enumeration of the purposes a museum serves, it has not always been this way. It has only at the beginning of the new millennium that education was officially added among the museum roles. Thus, museums have been recognized as non-formal education providers, having the role to transmit culture and thus educate people, serving as platforms wherefrom knowledge is being absorbed. Museums are cultural repositories where people can find inspiration, delight, where they can feel intrigued, curious, and where people interact, or need to interact with the exhibit. In most cases, this interaction requires mediation, involves the understanding of the other, of the visitor's perspective, which is with very few exception totally different from the one of the specialist, of the insider. There are some university departments which include Museum Studies in their offer. Yet, this is not a common situation. A more frequent case is the one where history, art history, or art pedagogy departments contain in their curriculum museology courses. At undergraduate level, though, the situation is even more critical as there are no such courses included in the curricula of tourism high chools. OBJECTIVES: The SSaNeProMM project promotes cooperation and exchange of good practices in the field of VET with the purpose of building a more inclusive society. Both IVET and CVET are considered in this partnership based on the complementarity between formal and non-formal education and on the societal need of vocational training in museums. The project is also meant to build bridges between the theoretical educational class and the on-the-job training specific to the museum work, thus leading to a reconsideration of the daily practices in the vocational training. To allow the development of their audiences, museums should engage in a dialogue with such audiences. This project aims at creating the premises for facilitating this sort of dialogue in the future, of providing tomorrow's museum specialists with the necessary mediation skills. In short, the project aims at producing a job description of the museum mediator, and at training people for providing them with the necessary skills. RESULTS: SSaNeProMM will provide museum staff and trainees in the process of shaping their vocational educational background with the tools necessary to achieve intercultural behavior and communication. The project will thus contribute to preparing today's museum mediators, anchored in the reality of the society, able to adapt to the multiple challenges that can be brought by the museum visitors, irrespective of their national origin, sex, profession, religion etc. Trainers and trainees will have the opportunity of reflecting on the importance of the own culture in a globalizing world, of communicating it correctly, understanding and respecting the expectation of the other. Culture is an identity mark but it has the power to connect people, to bring people together, to share information and knowledge, and attenuate cultural and societal divide. It attempts to raise awareness among museum professionals as for the significance of reflecting our own cultural identities and act as a catalyst, as a vehicle for mutual understanding, mediating the museum to the eyes and mind of the visitors. In this framework, the project will provide vocational training for prospective future museum specialists - the museum mediators - and for the museum staff, in order to exchange knowledge, experiences, to learn how to adapt to the others' expectations. IMPACT: The impact of the project will be identifiable at three levels: in the short-term, museum staff will be better trained (CVET, prepared to respond to the visitor's needs, to identify differences and act accordingly. In the medium-term, the museum will have the opportunity of selecting its staff from within a pool of ICVET trained young people, while in the long-term, museums will become organizations much better connected to the community in which it evolves. The exchange of experience is an educational model that uses the power that has to the human mind the concept of lived thing/ activity, as opposed to the mere theoretical concept. Therefore, this project is a hands-on, work-based exchange of good practices, as outlined in the activity of cultural organizations and training providers from five countries (RO, IT, SP, GR). It capitalizes learned lessons and turns them into taught concepts."