About​
Goal of the project
The project ECSTRA aims to help students to acquire crucial competencies (entrepreneurship, collaboration, complex problem solving, sustainability and social innovation) through volunteering activities (supported with training on different topics), which would involve solving real-life problems through social innovations.
To achieve this, we have several tasks to fulfil:
1. Enabling communities to take the initiative and tackle challenges themselves (creating social initiative canvassing guidebook and template, training community managers);
2. Enabling students to lead initiatives with sustainable long-term impact (providing support for running initiatives, creating e-trainings for initiative coordinators and volunteers, preparing volunteer management guidebook);
3. Improving non-formal competencies recognition systems so it would benefit young people (make recommendations for non-formal competence recognition, create non-formal competence recognition auto-approval standards for initiatives and competence assessment task bank).
THE IMPACT WE ARE CREATING
Project partners expect to directly involve not less than 1000 students into project activities while running a project and lay the foundation for better community engagement in partner organisation after the project ends.
Project ambition is that all produced results would not only become everyday practices for partner organisations but will also be widely used by other youth organisations as well as higher education institutions. Thus, all results will be presented in initiatives success symposiums (multiplier events) in each country and will be freely accessed on the project website, for use and modification. Moreover, other institutional networks will be additional formats, which should ensure project results sustainability as partners hope to transfer all those results into network collaboration practice.
WHO ARE BEHIND THIS?
Consortium consists of 3 forward-looking, strong universities – Vilnius University (VU), Jean Monnet University (UJM) and University of Granada (UGR), which stresses the importance of extracurricular activities and the benefits they bring, embrace innovative pedagogical approaches and focus on positive societal impact and youth organisations – LieU’topie that have experience working hands-on with students needs, their engagement and empowerment, promotion of volunteering and student led initiatives. Project management encompasses vital principles of the project by having a student-led organisation to be the leader of the whole project.
CONNECT WITH US!
Do you want to join the existing initiatives or create your own? Are you interested to integrate the best practices in our university?