One of the most important lesson learnt during COVID-19 crisis was the importance of ICT skills and the necessity of a wider scale virtual connection among people all over the world.
Unfortunately, the technology advances much faster than the capacity of human being to adapt to its requirements.
Particularly older generations are powerless in front of new technologies – mainly because usually the resistance to lifelong learning process is increasing directly proportional with age. Though exactly those people could benefit in a higher measure of different high tech instruments (aiming to control their health, to facilitate their provisioning with different goods, to entertain, to improve their life as a whole)
So particularly with seniors the ICT skills are very important but, in most cases, very low (or completely missing).
On this general background for all partner organizations – that have a particular concern for seniors’ involvement in lifelong learning process – the ”digital literacy” is an important direction for development educational activities.On the other hand, the entrepreneurial competencies become more and more important for anyone able to produce and sell something in the neighbourhood (as global trade is strongly affected by actual crisis and people are forced to come back to local markets and short chains of production) and on-line (as on-line commerce exponentially increased during last months).
By this project we will support a particular group of seniors – artisans with strong handicraft skills in developing ICT and entrepreneurial competences – from the reasons described above. These seniors will be able, then, to develop a business by valorising their artistic skills and the products they create, they will be able to develop a business plan and use technologies (computer, smartphone, Internet) to promote and sell their products not only at local but also on global market.
The project also addresses to seniors with a high level of EU-scepticism (in a general context of decreasing the trust in EU and European Project in whole Europe, during last months).
These seniors will be involved in activities that will put them in contact and virtual with other artisans from other countries – covering Europe from North (Poland) to South (Italy) and from East (Romania) to West (Portugal) and they will discover people with whom they are sharing common passions, pursuits and interests.
They will change not only work experiences (learning from each other and improving their traditional crafts with innovative elements from other countries – ex. Romanian pottery with Portuguese design, Spanish leather processed with Polish motifs etc.) and – not at least – develop long-lasting friendships.
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