"<< Background >>The outbreak of COVID-19 has significantly affected all aspects of life across Europe. In addition to threatening our health, the pandemic is also posing serious challenges to our socio-economic systems. Especially in rural areas farmers, entrepreneurs and communities in general have been particularly and negatively affected with respect to their employment and production prospects. According to the latest Eurostat figures (2018) rural areas account for more than 341 m ha, which represent 83% of the total EU area, and 30.6% of the EU’s population lives there. Rural areas are the fabric of our society and the heartbeat of our economy. They are a core part of our identity and our economic potential. We need to cherish and preserve them and invest in their future. Moreover, Covid-19 pandemic has created new challenges to overcome and has accelerated the need for rural areas to adapt to new market needs and digitalization. As regard the latter aspect digital skills are considered essential for global competitiveness, boosting jobs and growth, while internet can also play a vital role in terms of providing high- quality education and training. In 2019, the overall level of digital skills in the EU was lowest among adults who were living in rural areas (48% had basic or above basic digital skills), rising to 55% for adults living in towns and suburbs, and peaking at 62% for adults living in cities. Transitions require locally adapted solutions that both improve the economic and social conditions of farming, enable generational renewal and contribute to the development, resilience and attractiveness of rural areas. Research and innovation is critically important to develop and upscale knowledge, practices, technological and social innovations that will enable transitions towards sustainable farming systems and the development of rural communities.The project is conceived as a tool to promote and reboot entrepreneurship in the agri-food sector in rural areas, through the digital training of people and exchange of good practices, facilitating the learning of business management contents specifically adapted to the agribusiness, craft and the production of local goods. Europe is boosting the agri-food sector, both at local and regional level, with the aim of strengthening it as much as possible and advancing competitiveness and sustainability. EU Member States need to build their rural development programmes following and respecting all the needs of the industry. The importance of the rural environment for all European countries is already sufficient motivation for the development of training actions that seek their territorial integration, combating the gender and socioeconomic imbalance between rural and urban areas, by improving incomes through economic diversification and by promoting sustainable development and job creation.So, the RURAL JUMP-START project addresses the following needs:1. The urgency to give a concrete boost to rural and sustainable tourism and gastronomic offer focusing especially on the production of local goods and craft fostering their competitiveness on the territory with the aim of strengthening the sector as much as possible;2. The necessity of building a balanced territorial development of rural economies and communities including the creation and maintenance of employment;3. The exingency to create a synergy between local producers, entrepreneurs and artisans in order to promote and raise awareness of the delights of the territory from a gastronomic and local artifacts point of view;4. The necessity of feeding the revaluation and the preservation of the territory and local communities by training in a personalized way not only adults but also young people and immigrants;5. To improve local entrepreneurship and professional development by emphasizing the importance of acquiring innovative competences providing participants with digital tools and e-skills to make locals competitive.<< Objectives >>As the COVID-19 pandemia is spreading around the globe, the introduction of social distancing, national lockdowns and tier systems at national and local level since March 2020 has hindered almost all economic activity across European countries, especially in rural areas and countryside where the economy was already at risk.So, by implementing the project and his activities, participating partners and the coordinator aim to achieve and accomplish the following objectives:1. To promote the territory by expanding the dissemination of its local products (both handmade goods and gastronomic products) to make them better know at both local and regional level increasing productivity in rural areas. The main aim is to stimulate the dissemination of economic activities to a wider level and to to reach a higher employment rate, which ultimately results in balanced regional development;2. To foster sustainable tourism by both improving the Km0 market and energy efficiency of businesses and reducing the development of waste attracting in this way more and more responsible and aware tourists to the country;3. To create and strengthen a network of cooperation between local entrepreneurs, owners of hotels, museums, local producers, craftsmen whose works can be complementary (website, marketing, handicrafts, food processing, etc.) offering them the opportunity to get to know more deeply both at the local level and by tourists. The main objective is that everyone actively helps each other by creating a strong, lively and lasting synergy;4. To build a social environment in which adults, young people and immigrants can feel integrated in order to avoid migration of villagers to larger cities. The main aim is to give to these people specific training so that they end up living in the country;5. To promote entrepreneurship in rural areas through integrated digital training and by developing innovative pedagogical tools. The aim is to improve cross-cutting business management skills and the exchange of good entrepreneurship practices. It is necessary to provide participants who have opted or are interested in investing in the rural environment with the necessary e-skills, management skills, financing, distribution and communication thus contributing to the sustainable development of rural area.Moreover, relevant stakeholders and policy makers at the most appropriate level will be identified and involved in project activities such as round-tables that will promote the course content. Therefore, the objectives of the project will be achieved by following specific priorities:-Common values, civic engagement and participation: the project will support active citizenship and ethics in lifelong learning; it will foster the development of social and intercultural competences and critical thinking;- Improving the availability of high quality learning opportunities for adults: this priority provides support for the creation and development of flexible learning offers adapted to the learning needs of adults by developing digital training opportunities;-Creating upskilling pathways, improving accessibility and increasing take-up of adult education: this priority aims at promoting adult education opportunities, particularly for adults with a low level of skills, knowledge and competences. Creation of new upskilling pathways should allow adult learners to enhance their key competences and to progress towards higher qualifications.<< Implementation >>The RURAL JUMP-START project is going to implement the following specific activities: - 3 Project results; - 5 Transnational Meetings; - Online meetings each month; - 1 LTTA (C1) in Turkey in September 2022; - 6 Multiplier events in September/October 2023 in each participating country; PROJECT RESULTS ( they will be better explained in the next section) TRANSNATIONAL MEETINGS and ONLINE MEETINGS: 5 transnational meetings will form an integral part of the strategic partnership. Each partner meeting will address key project deliverables, project management and monitoring activity. This will include budget management, progress and timesheet reporting, workplan and risk register review, project results progress update etc. Transnational meetings within RURAL JUMP-START project will take place within key periods of the project’s lifetime: before the development and/or after the finalization of the project’s key outputs and results, allowing partners both to reflect on the achieved results as well to effectively plan and organize the project’s upcoming tasks and activities. The schedule of the transnational project meetings is described herewith:1. Kick-off meeting will be held in Spain by ADRI JILOCA GALLOCANTA and GEINNOVA in Month 1 (M1); 2. Second transnational meeting will be held in Poland by IDEA4LIFE in Month 6 (M6); 3. Third transnational meeting will be held in Italy by EXEO LAB in month 12 (M12); 4. Forth transnational meeting will be held in Portugal by UPYOUTH in month 18 (M18);5. Fifth transnational meeting will be held in Cyprus by DIONE in month 24 (M24). The face-to-face meetings will be complemented by monthly steering committee meetings (online) to ensure the project outcomes. LEARNING, TEACHING, TRAINING ACTIVITIES: RURAL JUMP-START Transnational training in digital competences (C1) will be organized in Turkey in September 2022. The training event will last for 4 days and comprise a total of 20 hours of face-to-face learning for adult participants of the project on how to improve digital and IT competences to both ensure their fully participation in the PR3 implementation ( the cooperative online platform) and to improve their skills so that they can subsequently apply them also in rural contexts where they operate in order to be more competitive and recognisable in the local labour market, how much regional and national promoting in this way their social and economic empowerment and inclusion. The result of the training will be the establishing of a dynamic ""hub"" of like-minded adult who are highly interested in high quality learning opportunities and who desire to develop strong relationships and prolong their collaboration into future projects and/or initiatives with the aim of improving rural areas from an entrepreneurship perspective.MULTIPLIER EVENTS 6 RURAL JUMP-START campaigns will be organized and implemented in each partner countries in the form of a multiplier event in September/October 2023 (each multiplier event will be implemented in different days). The main aim of these events will be to present and disseminate the project’s achieved results and attract participants for the further implementation of the training programme and contents developed . In addition, the campaign in each country aims to make known the cooperative online platform and his forum section to fuel the importance of creating a strong network and collaboration between participants, associated partners and stakeholders more so in the post-COVID era.<< Results >>RURAL JUMP-START project is expected to have significant intangible results on the direct target group: (a) creation of new possibilities for economic development by increasing entrepreneurship and training opportunities; (b) enhanced opportunities for social inclusion of participants;(c) the development of highly innovative and transferable training content that encourages entrepreneurship in the rural agri-food sector, thereby improving the sustainability of Europe’s rural environment; (d) skills increasing of participants in their working and learning backgrounds;(e) enhanced opportunities for economic inclusion and employability of participants; (f) enhanced employability, productivity and active participation in the local economy; (g) improving the interest in the field of local products and craft in rural areas; (g) creation of new possibilities for economic development by increasing training opportunities.Moreover, within RURAL JUMP-START project, partners will develop the following Project Results: PR1: RURAL JUMP-START local action report. It will be a report on good entrepreneurship practices in the European agri-food sector. It will define the training objectives to be developed later and it will integrate local and regional stakeholder groups. The RURAL JUMP-START local action report is considered an important milestone for the start of the project as it will guide the development and final achievement of the educational and supporting objectives.PR2: RURAL JUMP-START training programme. It is a specific formative guide focused on digital and entrepreneurial skills that the project wants to give participants in order to foster local entrepreneurship and disseminate local products in a more widely way taking into account all the information and data collected thanks to PR1. Contents will be adapted to the agribusiness, craft and the production of local goods and tailored to the needs of participants in each country with a common guideline.PR3: Cooperative online platform. It is a cooperative online platform including an online chat forum and gamification make available to participants in order to assess, develop and improve their employability and IT skills and competences; expand their network, keep in touch and share ideas and material with other people from both their area and all over Europe; create a sense of community and connectivity. Beyond this, the project aims to obtain concrete and immediate outcomes (that will be developed and explained in detail in the project description part) such as:1. RURAL JUMP-START GUIDE 2. RURAL JUMP-START PARTNERSHIP AGREEMENT 3. MANAGEMENT AND ADMINISTRATIVE PLAN 4. QUALITY ASSURANCE REPORT 5. SURVEY FORMS 6. DISSEMINATION PLAN and SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY 7. RURAL JUMP-START PLATFORM 8. RURAL JUMP-START BRANDING PLAN 9. PROJECT’S BOOKLET 10. IMPACT RELEVANT REPORT 11. SUSTAINABILITY PLAN 12. MULTIPLIER EVENTS"

It is strongly necessary for CCS professionals to develop entrepreneurial and digital competences defined in ENTRECOMP and DIGCOMP 2.1. to foster entrepreneurship and encourage them to become key players to modify the way creative products, cultural goods and events are created, managed, disseminated and consumed during and after Covid-19. The increasing and, almost mandatory digital shift, is leading to the need for digital skills for CCS to accelerate the digital transformation. Project CO-ART addresses entrepreneurial and digital competence development of young unemployed, self employed CCS workers and aspiring art entrepreneurs through Online Escape Rooms. Moreover, CO-ART will provide an adequate training programme to equip youth workers with these new working environments and tools and enable them to support digital and entrepreneurial competence development. CO-ART addresses the needs of 2 main target groups: 1) Young (age 18-29) unemployed and/ or self employed/ freelance CCS workers and aspiring (art) entrepreneurs who are exposed to the risk of exclusion due to the Covid-19 crisis and other social, economical or geographical obstacles. 2) Youth Workers and Trainers eager to gain non-traditional tools and knowledge to support young people in the development of entrepreneurial and digital competences. THE PROJECT’S SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES ARE TO:1:Equip and train Youth workers with non-traditional online learning tools to support the development of entrepreneurial and digital competences among young CCS workers and aspiring art entrepreneurs.2:Develop non-traditional online learning tools to empower young people, to acquire entrepreneurial and digital competences needed to encourage entrepreneurial activities of young, aspiring entrepreneurs in the CCS during and after Covid-19 crisis. 3: To establish and reinforce virtual cooperation between young culture workers and organisations at local and European levels during and after Covid-19 crisis. The ultimate goal of CO-ART is to reinforce digital networks between young unemployed or self employed CCS workers and encourage them to be the key players who accelerate the digital transformation and innovative, entrepreneurial mind-set in CCS.CO-ART will deliver 3 Intellectual Outputs IO1: CO-ART Online Escape Rooms: Compendium of challenge-based resources (24 online escape rooms) for young unemployed CCS workers and aspiring (art) entrepreneurs acquire specific entrepreneurial and digital skills and competences. IO2: CO-ART KIT: Training programme for Youth Workers: In-service training programme to ensure that youth workers harness the potential of the CO-ART online escape room resources and the online platform to support the target group members develop the competencies identified. IO3: CO-ART Online Platform: Online platform that will host and provide access to the IO1 and IO2, as well as provide space for young CCS professionals to network. CO-ART will implement a Transnational Training Activity for youth workers from all partner countries, who upon returning will deliver a Local training activity for young people. Moreover, a CO-ART will implement a set of dissemination activities, such as Multiplier events, social media campaigns and others. Most of the activities will be accessible also online, including multiplier events, to ensure active participation of target groups. The project expects that Partner organisations will become experts in the use and create non-traditional online learning tools, and will be able to transmit them to other organisations and institutions dealing with disadvantaged youth within their local/ regional and national environments. It is estimated that the materials developed by CO-ART will be exploited widely across Europe, mainly due to the digital characteristics and the fact that that partners will adopt these methods in their work. Moreover new transnational partnerships will be established in order to address how entrepreneurial and digital competences together can ease the digital transition of CCS and its professionals.

Main goal of the project ‘Developing Capacities of Organizations Working on Gender Inequality in Rural Areas’ is to increase capacities of the organizations representing Albania, Romania, Kosovo, Germany, Greece, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Poland, Serbia to deliver activities fighting the roots of gender inequality and leading to gender empowerment. Project objectives: 1. To equip the organizations by knowledge, tools enabling them to identify and to understand the roots of gender inequality in rural areas;2. To train staff of participating organizations to design and deliver activities addressing gender inequality and leading to empowerment;3. To increase community awareness in rural areas on the importance of empowering girls and women;4. To improve networking amongst involved CSOs and other stakeholders, support sharing best practices and developing new project ideas leading to creating more gender equal societies. Set project goal and objectives are in line with the vision of the organizations and their long term goals. The project reflects the European polices and priorities set by Europe 2020 including promoting gender equality and women’s rights across the world and integrating a gender equality perspective into all EU activities and policies including youth one. The project goal and objectives we will meet through series of capacity building and mobility activities. Key project results will be‘Guidelines for Youth Workers and Educators: How to Empower Young Girls and Women Coming from Rural Areas’, Booklet of Good Practices and new local, national and international projects addressing gender inequality.

Life is bringing more and more challenges for young people, such as unemployment, the refugee crisis, violation of human rights, pandemic, isolation, intercultural misunderstanding, in a very diverse world, and these are only the major challenges that young people have. In this situation, young people feel frustrated and abandoned, outside of the community life, which might lead to segregation and violence. Youth workers are taking a key role in helping young people to deal with frustration and become active citizens, they help to overcome difficulties grow through challenges, and take responsibilities. Through youth training, they help to develop a “survival” set of competencies: those that cannot be developed in any other circumstances such as tolerance, mutual understanding and respect, non-violent communication, critical thinking, creativity, and many others.Though the role of youth training can hardly be exaggerated in the nowadays situation, the world of youth training is also developing, reacting to the current tendencies and challenges. One of those is critical thinking, which is an essential skill and basis for personal and professional development and for peaceful behavior. One of the instruments, that can help youth workers and youth trainers to become more efficient in the process of developing critical thinking of young people is better to use of visual thinking instruments, such as infographics, sketch noting, graphical recording, doodling, graphical facilitation and e.t. Those phenomena already exist in the world of business trainings and bringing very good educational results, unfortunately, not many youth trainers know how to use those instruments and how to apply them to the efficient educational and youth work. Visuals in numbers:-65% of the people are visual learners-Image is browsed 94% more often -Information share 40time more often with images & videos-Image processed in 0.01sec.-75% of neurons are responsible for processing imagesThe aim of the project Go Visual is to raise awareness and develop the competence of educators, trainers, teachers, youth workers, youth, and young people, in visual thinking tools and graphic facilitation, in order to empower, raise effectiveness and quality of educational process and learning.That is why we decided to create a project for educators, trainers, and youth workers that will be focused on the following objectives:- To increase awareness and importance of the use of the visual thinking tools in educationand youth work, and how to apply them to concrete youth training and work;-To learn basic elements of visual language and how to combine them to create meanings and to develop your own visual library-To explore sketch-noting & graphic recording techniques: to visualise and structure, concepts and ideas in an easy and efficient way for personal use.- To explore why visuals useful and how they help to better remember & understand things, empower and motivate, grab attention & and call to action.- To learn what graphical facilitation is and how to use it in different contexts and for specific goals- To learn how to stimulate critical thinking and creativity with graphical tools.- To discover digital and online instruments of visual thinking. - To learn how to create and design content for digital education activities - To learn about various platforms which can be used in online learning and practice in using them- To become more self-expressive and to reduce risks of misunderstanding;- To create a cascade chain reaction and multipliers effect of the development of visual thinking and use of graphics in education, learning and youth work- To create visual instruments to support the self-learning process of visual think and graphic facilitation competence development. In order to rich our objectives Project will consist of the next stage. -Online course #1-Go Visual: Basic training course-Local practice #1-Online course #2-Go Visual: Digital training course-Local Practice #2-Online course #3-Intellectual Outputs creation ( Graphic facilitation On-line course, Graphic Educational toolbox, Visual education games)-Go Visual: Evolution training course-Project conference & National Multiplier eventsThese objectives link to Erasmus+ objectives as project:- Provides youth workers with skills which are valuable for enhancing the work of NGOs and youth organizations around Europe; - equipping youth workers with competences and methods needed for transferring the common fundamental values of our society particularly to the hard to reach young people and preventing the violent radicalization of young people as well.- Enhances participants' foreign languages competences;- Promotes youth mobility in Europe, active citizenship, raises awareness and understanding of other cultures and countries among participants;- Fosters quality improvements in youth work, in particular through enhanced cooperation between organisation

"Club for Youth Empowerment 018 (KOM 018), Serbia would like to apply to Erasmus + program, for the CBY project ""Safebook for safe youth"" in cooperation with Beyond Borders – Italy, Idea for Life – Poland, Youth Center “Perspektiva” – Albania, Red Cross Novo Sarajevo – Bosnia and Herzegovina, Jordan Youth Innovation Forum – Jordan and Euro-Med EVE in Tunisia for the period of 24 months. The project idea is focused on the safety of young people, especially affected by COVID-19 pandemic. “Safebook for safe youth” project aims at promotion of safety culture among young people through newly developed manual “Safebook” for youth work in the field of youth safety (http://kom018.org.rs/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/ENG-Safebook-Manual.pdf) . The manual was produced through Strategic partnership in the field of youth in 2021 by the applicant Club for Youth Empowerment 018 (KOM 018) together with Beyond Borders – Italy, and partners from Croatia and North Macedonia and is recognized as a good practice project by Serbian National Agency, Tempus Foundation. “Safebook” manual includes new and innovative methodologies and creative tools in the form of youth friendly manual for youth workers. Newly developed manual focuses on 5 segments of youth safety: peer violence, cyber bullying, abuse of psychoactive substances, discrimination, and mental health in time of COVID–19. Project Aim: To motivate youth workers and young people to take more active role in promotion of safety culture"