The COVID-19 crisis we are still facing with bring into light many individual and collective fears and vulnerabilities, and our project addresses to 3 of them:
- our seniors are very fragile and we need to take care not only of their health and wellbeing but also of the priceless heritage they possess (from life stories to arts, crafts and mysteries) that could be forever lost after their dying
2. globalisation made us slaves of buying same ”made in China” products (from furniture to cakes, same appearances, smells, tastes and sounds) and we neglect many beautiful thinks made by people in our neighbourhood, so many traditional crafts are faster and faster disappearing. But these represent not only a rich and complex interwoven tapestry combining tradition, heritage, culture, skills and design but also a mirror of the diversity of European cultural identity. In most cases, the biggest endangering on these priceless cultural values is the age of people who know and practice them – usually oldsters with artistic skills, handicraft masters, but illiterate in the fields of IT and entrepreneurship (representing indispensable competences for making their crafts to survive).
3. ICT skills are, sometimes, more important than writing – in these days to know or to not know how to use a smartphone, an application for on-line shopping or a platform for on-line communication can make the difference between life and death
Not at least, EU itself face with a strong identity crisis due to an increased lack of trust even from many EU ”fans”.
In these difficult times all partners reviewed their short, medium&longterm strategic documents, including SWOT analysis and underlying the following common points:
- Strengths: experienced staff able to quickly adapt to difficult condition, a variety and flexibility range of communication tools (easy adaptable to ”quarantine” conditions), a complementary expertise in different topics as entrepreneurial education, educational research, ITC etc, a particularly focus on improving and extending the supply of high quality learning opportunities tailored to the needs of their target groups (described as ”Participants” chapter);
- Weaknesses: not enough resources to address their senior learners (particularly when they are forced to stay home)-even in ”normal” times all partners face with a quite higher resistance related to lifelong learning and a high level of Euroscepticism at the level of these groups and they haven’t enough resources to better reach out these categories. From this issue appears a continuous need to have experienced and well-informed people working with this type of learners, to improve the qualification and expertise of their adult educators.
- Opportunities: starting from their main focus on adults’ education issues, their previous experience in multinational partnerships&their complementary expertise in different adults’ education fields partners share a common agreement on the importance of transnational project for improving the quality of their services – particularly for senior learners who proved to be most vulnerable in this period. All partners explicitly mentioned and underlined now in their strategic documents, as a main&transversal development priority, an increased participation to transnational projects and valorising each chance to involve seniors in transnational activities at European level
- Threats: losing the contact with their senior learners (particularly those who are not able enough to take part in on-line learning activities and who really need to improve basic competencies – in order to keep their jobs or improve their income or simply give forward their special handicraft skills) if the organisations are not able to provide attractive learning opportunities and educational approaches – tailored to their needs
In this context the main goal of the project is to contribute to facilitate a bigger participation of senior artisans with strong handicraft skills but illiterate in entrepreneurship and ICT and with a high level of Euroscepticism, in educational activities aiming to improve all lacking competences they need in order to promote and give forward their arts and keep, in this way, the EU’s ”united in diversity” heritage.
Specific objectives:
- enhancing the professional development of 154 adult educators by equipping them with important knowledge, improved abilities and behaviours needed to make them more flexible in adapting their educational tools to the need of a resistant and Euroscepting generation of senior artisans
- increasing the entrepreneurial and ICT competencies at the level of 280 senior artisans and fostering European identity and awareness both at their level and at the level of at least 21 small communities they are living in – by developing and testing new, innovative and flexible (easy to adapt) training materials that use the expertise of 7 countries
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