The Idea of the CHEER-Project is to help preserve of cultural heritage by fostering social enterprises with focus on local cultural practises and heritage. CHEER especially encourages long-term unemployed people to found social enterprises.
Based on the latest data provided by Eurostat, half of the unemployed people in Europe are currently long-term unemployed, which means they are out of work and have been actively seeking employment for at least a year.
Given this situation that many adults face in Europe, one of the best options is to be self-employed or start your own business. The CHEER project aims to tackle long term unemployment and social exclusion of disadvantaged groups with social entrepreneurship through cultural heritage.
2018 is the European Year of Cultural Heritage. According to a very recent Eurobarometer survey, 8 out of 10 Europeans believe that cultural heritage is important, not only to them personally, but also to their community, region, country and the EU as a whole. A very large majority take pride in cultural heritage, whether it is located in their own region or country, or in another European country.
Social entrepreneurship combines the ideas of business creation, economic development, and collaboration of people for facing common challenges. Social entrepreneurship pays equal attention to business sustainability, generating employment and promoting development of local communities. It is a form of entrepreneurship that has at the focus the society and individuals rather than business profit. Social entrepreneurship provides not only employment and income, but also self-accomplishment, the sense of belonging to the local community and serving common goals.
The objectives of CHEER project are:
1.To encourage and support start-up social enterprises to make an impact on their local communities;
2. To build social entrepreneurship capacity within local communities;
3. To struggle long-term unemployment, alienation, discrimination and poverty;
4. To motivate and empower people with difficulties to fit in the labour market;
5. To exploit the local cultural heritage for the economic and social growth of local communities;
The operational objectives of the project are:
1. To develop a methodology for the identification of competences of unemployed people.
2. To develop a training programme with practical activities and tools, aiming at training the participants into social entrepreneurship and at being able to formulate their business ideas.
3. To develop a guide, addressed to adult trainers, so that they will be able to work with unemployed people and support them in exploiting cultural heritage for social entrepreneurship.
4. To develop on-line learning platform with additional on-line learning resources, such as webinars, videos, Information sharing space and social networking space.
The project will target:
- Adult trainers, business consultants, incubators, social business associations
- Final beneficiaries: long-term unemployed people
- Indirect beneficiaries: local communities
The project has a real European dimension in its design. The partners are coming from six different European countries and the project has been designed, so that each partner contributes its experience, expertise and capacity for solving common problems. The transnational collaboration will capitalise the previous adult training experience and competence of all project partners, thus raising also the added value of previous projects and activities implemented by the project partners. The joint action in this field will contribute to mutual openness, respect and support to both common values and cultural diversity.
The project will develop and test methodologies and instruments to support long term unemployed people so that they can exploit the local cultural heritage of their region as the basis for the development of social enterprises, local capacity building and social inclusion.
Project CHEER will create an online learning community of people who want to start a social business exploiting the local cultural heritage.