The U.Power phases
The first output from the U.Power consortium is the Consolidated Consortium Report which will offer fundamental insights for European researchers willing to further raise awareness and develop studies on women engaging in social entrepreneurship. This report is important as there is a noticeable absence of reports and statistics regarding the number of social businesses managed by women. The report is a resource for all organisations and institutions interested in promoting social entrepreneurship measures, in additon to researchers studying the impact of women entrepreneurs initiatives with a social purpose.
The report is also an aid for the U.Power consortium providing information about female social entrepreneurship as well as gaps and needs in order to empower women.
Phase three of the project aims to train adult educators on the content developed in the MOOC through a Training of Trainers (ToT) programme. Firstly, the Training of Trainers will be piloted with adult educators. This will enable adult educators to engage and efficiently coach women on the pathway to setting up their own social enterprise.
Following on from this training, to improve the coaching capacity of the adult who attended the ToT, participants will provide coaching sessions with the women involved in the piloting of the MOOC as an opportunity to concretely support women in starting a social enterprise.
At the same time, U.Power project partners will pilot the MOOC developed, seeking to improve women’s spirit of initiative and increase their entrepreneurial skills.
Phase 2 of U.Power project sees the creation of a MOOC - Introduction to Social Entrepreneurship for Women composed of 7 modules, identified through the preliminar needs analysis completed and field research conducted through the country mapping. An additional module will consist in a ‘Serious Games’ on entrepreneurship. Partners will take as example the ISGEE – “Implementing Serious Games in Entrepreneurship Education” and its main output, the Entrepoly game. The 7 modules include:
- Social entrepreneurship fundamentals
- Unique Value Proposition, Business Model Canvas and Business Plan
- Strategic planning: methods and tools
- Financial management and crowdfunding
- Marketing and promotion
- Soft skills for entrepreneurship
- Networking and cooperation
The national workshops will be organised which act as an occasion to exchange point of views between a wide array of stakeholders and consequently produce policy recommendations, addressing the main issues that the whole project implementation will shed light on. Furthermore, the main project outputs and activities will be presented during national events in each country, notably increasing the visibility of the project and providing all the participants with a wide range of information about female social entrepreneurship, the issues related to that and, most of all, the new developed blended approach. The foreseen discussions and matchings will result in policy recommendations, which will highlight concrete points of actions that each target group can take.