Duration: 1. 9. 2017 – 31. 8. 2019
Project reference: 2017-2-NO02-KA205-000946
Project webpage: https://youthreworking.eu
The Youth Re-working Rural project brings together 7 partners coming from 6 EU countries (Norway, Italy, Spain, Greece, Latvia, and Slovenia) which decided to cooperate trans-nationally to find innovative solutions to common problems. The project involves rural areas characterized by different pre-assessed economic vocation but that are experiencing common territorial challenges, such as an economic reconversion from traditional sectors, such as agriculture and manufacturing, to the services sector and knowledge-based activities, low population density, a decrease of inhabitants due to migration towards big cities inside and outside the countries, the brain drain of young people, and extremely high youth unemployment rates for most of the partners.
The economic reconversion is furthermore causing the presence of empty, abandoned buildings previously used for economic activities, that need to be reconverted and exploited economically to contribute to local development and youth employment. Considering that young people with a sense of initiative cannot easily find appropriate spaces and professional networks to improve their competencies and self-employment potentialities in rural areas, the project’s main objective is to promote co-working spaces as a concept to reconvert abandoned spaces and to encourage entrepreneurship culture among young people as a new form of employee-driven innovation (EDI).
Its specific objectives are:
– to promote employment and entrepreneurship in European rural areas by increasing young people capabilities to reconvert empty spaces to host co-working and hubs activities
– to promote youth skills and competencies for the development of co-working spaces/incubators focused on the economic vocation of the territories
– to foster youth entrepreneurship, networking, training and new opportunities for local development.
Outputs of the project
- A State of the Art and Mapping of opportunities
- EQF of the co-working start-upper
- Training programme for co-working spaces
- E-book for the start-up and management of co-working spaces
- A virtual community for local development through co-working
- Best practices and open challenges booklet
The role of STEP Institute
We were responsible for the training program for co-working spaces. Overall STEP contributed with its expertise and network to all project outputs. We played an active role in dissemination activities and multiplication of the project results.
