"Theatre Pitching for Employment (THE PITCH) is an international Erasmus+ KA2 Strategic Partnership focused on sharing knowledge and practice of “pitching” between partner organisations from Croatia (Zagreb), Turkey (Antalya), Slovenia (Maribor), Poland (Krakow), and two from Greece (Thessaloniki and Athens). More precisely, it is a partnership of NGO's, public cultural organisations, tertiary education institutions, and organisations working with/for the unemployed, who have come together to share their knowledge and achieve their compatible educational goals through combining drama and inclusive practices with exciting presentation technique of ""pitching"". Pitching is one of the most important skills at the labour market (if not The crucial one) – as anyone who has looked for a job can attest for. Knowing how to present yourself (or your project) in a concise, confident and interesting way can make or break job interviews, crowdfunding opportunities, and project presentations. By having their educators join these workshops, partner organisations raise their human resources (by raising the self-esteem and soft- skills of their educators) and improve their and EU Key competences (especially social and civic competences, cultural awareness and expression, entrepreneurship, English language etc.). To achieve its educational and sharing goals, each of the partner organisations hosted one short-term learning, teaching, and training programmes (LTT, i.e. educational theatre pitching workshops). The educational process in these workshops gave pitching a little “twist”, in order to make it “real” -each of the workshops ended with a Pitching forum – a live pitching programme that was livestreamed online to a global audience of interested individuals. Pitching forums were run by local jury panels who gave the participants positive feedback on their pitch – which ensured competitive and fun educational environment for the participants. Feeling positive, participants pitched (presented) their project proposals for tackling some of explored topics of marginalised people at a labour market in Europe. As such, Pitching Forums were not only also sites of training for educators and marginalised groups, but also sites for promotion of creativity, EU and European values.In order to act inclusively, each partner made sure to address one of the local issues of marginalisation and discrimination at the labour market, and involved few members of the local marginalised groups in workshops – as local participants (mostly unemployed youth and people with disability).Regardless if they are local or international participants, participants’ feedback shows that joining THE PITCH workshops contributed to raising of their self-esteem, thought them new and useful skills (be it in their work as educators, or at the labour market). Participants learned how to use their body language and nonverbal communication and improve their pitch – effectively helping them in their educational work and/or at the labour market. Having to present their own projects in front of a live (online) audience, in a fast-changing format and in English language, was experience that developed their personal and professional skills and/or motivated them to join the labour market or even start their own business.Empowered by this experience, participants organised local presentations and workshops where they transferred their newly gained knowledge from international to local level. It must be said that this partnership was heavily influenced by force majeure circumstances since long before COVID-19, and it still managed to finish most of what was planned – empowering partner organisations additionally, supporting their future cooperation, and teaching them to be open to use of online education.In total, seven educational workshops (7 LTT) were held, where 112 participants (those on international mobilities and local participants), including participants with fewer opportunities (4) and participants with disability (7) got to learn pitching and not only learn but also act inclusively. Additionally, partners hosted three (3) transnational project meetings (TPM) intended for monitoring, planning, and management. This ensured continuous communication and monitoring, which proved to be crucial in these difficult times of COVID-19.Even though this partnership was held under difficult circumstances (force majeure caused problems since 2019: exit of the Polish partner, earthquakes in Croatia, and COVID-19), partners finished their plan and produced educational materials, e-Manuals (7) and e-Videos (7) from each of the workshops that are published, alongside recordings of livestreams of all Pitching Forums (7), and remain free open sources available at EU platforms (EPALE, SALTO, and VALOR platforms), and on partners’ websites and social media. Everyone who is interested can use them and pitch for Europe!"

"The ""Visually Impaired youth with Vested Autonomy – Social inclusion via social entrepreneurship"" /V.I.V.A./ was a project targeting young people with visual impairments” and in particular to facilitate their social inclusion and empowerment through the development of their leadership, entrepreneurial, and intercultural skills. The consortium is led by Ofensiva Tinerilor which has been working for and with v.i. children and young people since 2014. Part of the consortium is 1 social enterprise organization The International Council for Cultural Centers (I3C), BG, a National rehabilitation center for the blind (BG), two unions of the blind – in Iceland and Florence, a youth organization with excellent experience in working with v.i. youths – Ofensiva (RO), as well as one universities EL with experience in entrepreneurship and inter-cultural skills. The bouquet of partner organizations processes specific knowledge and expertise in the field of social inclusion, peer learning, theatre training, youth empowerment, entrepreneurship, leadership, and inter-cultural communication skills, applying different methods to combat unemployment and social exclusion of the visually impaired (v.i.) young people. The key objective of the project was to encourage v.i. young people’s active participation in society by designing, testing, and implementing a tailor-made training program for developing their social entrepreneurship, leadership, and inter-cultural communication skills. Thus, project partners created a sophisticated product to address the two main target groups’ needs (v.i. young people to become social entrepreneurs and youth workers to be provided with an innovative tool for supporting them). The project had specific interrelated objectives to be achieved: - to create an innovative social entrepreneurship training program for v.i. youths (Intellectual output) for development of their leadership, social entrepreneurship, and inter-cultural skills; - conduct one joint staff training event (C1) in order to train youth workers (a minimum of 2 representatives of each involved institution visiting Bulgaria for a shared training activity) in using the training program – to test a pilot version of the training program with a local group of v.i. young people in Bulgaria; - conduct one blended training event for groups of v.i. young people (C2) from the partner countries (a minimum of 5 v.i. participants from each country visiting Romania for 5 effective days and continuing the training with additional virtual mobility – six synchronous online sessions). This particular objective was adapted to the restrictions imposed by the COVID 19 pandemic and the C2 training took place as blended mobility. The participants in C2 becoming the V.I.V.A. pilot group of v.i. young entrepreneurs who have been trained and have tested their skills in a multicultural environment; - organize substantial multiplier events in BG, TK, IS, EL, RO, BE, and IT used for dissemination, multiplication and validation of the training programme, they all took place at the end of the project. The central tangible output of the project is the training programme on social entrepreneurship for v.i. youth including practical activities related to three main pillars: - Leadership skills – important for any young person, willing to undertake an entrepreneurial path. Leadership skills are important if a person is about to manage and empower others in connection with shared social and professional endeavors. Among other things they cover communicating, motivating, delegating, being positive, being trustworthy, being creative, providing adequate feedback, being responsible, being committed, being flexible); - Social entrepreneurship – a general set of rules, related to the development and sustaining of a social enterprise, including the practical adoption and use of the “bread in the dark” entrepreneurial experience, together with the v.i. adapted “bakers without borders game”, which provides a highly innovative and attractive view on social entrepreneurship for v.i. youths; - Inter-cultural skills – being successful in the global village requires awareness of and acquiring intercultural skills. The developed methodology is empowering young v.i. people to be autonomous and independent members of society; develop leadership, inter-cultural and social entrepreneurial skills; to support the development of young people-centred youth work and to foster active participation in society of young people. The project long term results are to raise the awareness of society towards the challenges of young visually impaired people. A network of V.I.V.A. supporters developed at the local, national and international levels to further apply and disseminate the V.I.V.A. methodology and offer youth with VI the opportunity to develop entrepreneurial models to be implemented by themselves in their communities."

The project “Dive 3: Zero to One > 1 to N” was implemented in a period of 14 months and it included the following partners: YAK (North Macedonia), OENEF (Greece), EuroDEMOS (Romania), ACI (Costa Rica), SocialWorkLab (Peru), Belle & Co (South Africa), IAFA (Portugal), Demostene (Italy), N.L.K DOO (Slovenia); ECIM (Poland); I3C (Bulgaria); Jóvenes Ambientalistas (Nicaragua). Main goal of the project was to contribute to fight youth unemployment by supporting development of cross-sectoral cooperation in involved countries and between different regions of the world represented in the project. During the 14 months of the implementation period of the project we have realized the capacity building and mobility activities separated in two phases. During the first phase the partners took place in the following mobility activities: partnership building activity in Florina, Greece and study visit in Ljubljana, Slovenia. These activities provided to the participants an opportunity to work on development of new projects, to learn from practices of other countries and to develop set of competencies that they used in the process of creating cross-sectoral partnerships for social entrepreneurship and young people. The gained experiences and knowledge each partner used for implementation of series of public raising awareness activities (series of life streaming debates on social entrepreneurship, local workshops and round tables in the countries) capacity building activities at local level striving towards supporting and raising awareness on cross-sectoral cooperation in their communities and countries. In second phase, the partners took part in several mobility activities study visit in Cape Town, South Africa and job shadowing in Peru, Costa Rica and Nicaragua. Finally, we have implemented 5 days international conference that brought together representatives of different sectors (decision makers in the field, education institutions, CSOs, municipalities) to work together with the young people. As a result of the conference set of policy recommendations on cross-sectoral cooperation were developed and in the next steps each partner had dissemination strategy for raising the impact of them. The project brought numerous results as: reports from all implemented mobility activities, reports from all national activities implemented in 12 countries with achieved results, media report with gathered media announcements for the project and series of video tutorials on social entrepreneurship that contains lessons learned through project and practical tips that can be applied by different stakeholders in different communities as well set of policy recommendations that resulted from the conference. All these results were published online on the project web site. To sum up, within 14 months of work the project “Dive 3: Zero to One > 1 to N” reached over 3023 young people from Europe and the world, Alumni network of 548 young people, youth workers, social entrepreneurs, more of 52 entrepreneurs, 18 municipalities, 62 CSOs, 33 educational institutions were directly involved in the activities that contributed for creation of strong networking between different stakeholders relevant for the field social entrepreneurship.