Goals

• Upskilling and/or reskilling NEETs and women by equipping them with the skills needed for the growing green economy, providing new career paths that are in high demand both now and in the future through training in green sector areas namely, Forest-based care, Waste Reduction, Social agriculture, Energy supply, Urban green care, Eco-tourism, Green Entrepreneurship.
• Provide to NEETs and young women the education, practical experience and connections with relevant stakeholders to step out of unemployment and jumpstart their career path in the green sector through training materials and digitalised resources, as well as work-shadowing placements, and networking roundtables.
• Increase cross sectoral and transnational cooperation to promote the social and economic inclusion of disadvantaged NEETs among organisations and practitioners active in the field of youth employment.
• Adopt participatory action research methodology to apply co-creation in the design and development of the project activities through a User-Scrutiny panel consisting of 30 youth practitioners, green sector professionals, NEETs and women

Activities

• WP1 – Project management
• WP2 – YOUTHECO TRAINING PACKAGE AND IMPLEMENTATIONS
• WP3 – ONLINE YOUTHECO HUB
• WP4 – KNOWLEDGE ACCELERATION VIA WORK-SHADOWING AND CO-CREATED POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS
• WP5 – DISSEMINATION & COMMUNICATION

Results

• Training package available in 6 languages (EN, DE, GR, MT, SL, PL) comprising of a Training Course for youth workers and educators, including 7 modules (i.e. Forest-based care, Waste Reduction, Social agriculture, Energy supply, Urban green care, Eco-tourism, Green Entrepreneurship).
• An Open Resource e-Toolbox for NEETs and women comprised of 60 resources and based on the Greencomp framework, building knowledge on the 7 key green sectors of the Training package.
• Capacity building with 72 youth practitioners and implementation workshops with 180 NEETs and young women.
• Online YOUTHECO Hub, featuring a Green sector eDatabase comprising 30 green sector organisations/companies and 30 NEETs for work shadowing placements.
• Dialogue virtual roundtables involving 40 green sector professionals, policy-makers, educators, youth workers, NEETs and women for the co-creation of a Policy and Practice Recommendations Guide.
• Five local awareness-raising events, and one social media campaign aiming to reach more than 250,000 people through a strategic coordinated dissemination sustainability and exploitation plan.

Impact

• Empowering young people and environmental organisations with state-of-the-art training and online tools.
• Improving the awareness and knowledge of relevant stakeholders, as they will be able to participate and benefit from the project and be part of the YOUTHECO network, which will improve their chances to collaborate with similar organisations from different countries and sectors and with a larger number of organisations.
• Improving the knowledge and skills of the staff of the partner organisations in the project areas and beyond, and strengthening the close network of the participating organisations.

Partners

• Aspire Education Group GmbH (Germany, coordinator)
• Izobraževalni center Geoss d.o.o.
• SYMPLEXIS (Greece)
• FRIENDS OF THE EARTH MALTA (Malta)
• RESEARCH AND EDUCATION OF SOCIAL EMPOWERMENT AND TRANSFORMATION-RESET LTD (Cyprus)
• The Polish Farm Advisory and Training Centre not-for-profit Sp. z o o. (Poland)

Project duration between 1. 11. 2022  and 31. 10. 2024, co-funded by the European Union.