Between September 3-10, Ana Ampova, Sandra Dimkovska, Sandra Ampova and Blagorodna Ampova attended a training course named ”Youth for social and solidarity economy”, held in Florina, Italy. This is their feedback from attending the activity:

This course was an excellent opportunity to promote social entrepreneurship and social economy as whole. Being part of this course has been a great experience. Through different interactive tasks, we had the opportunity to learn the “secrets” of social economy and the features of the contemporary successful entrepreneurship. It was very interesting to meet various organisations from all over Europe and their work in the NGO. This gave us even more inspiration and ideas for the activities and debates that were part of the project.

We had a meeting in the Chamber of Commerce, where we learned about the perspectives of the economy and about their further plans. Although Florina has a low rate of employability, it was interesting to see how they plan to improve the economy. Also we visited a prosperous company for beans and learned how they started, how they achieved the accomplishment and how they work today. The study visit was a practical way to see how social enterprises work and see benefits of social entrepreneurship.

Of course, we met wonderful fun people and learned about new cultures. We had an International night where we shared various tasty food items from each tradition, heard different music, but had the same fun. Also, we had a few karaoke nights, we laughed, we danced and unconsciously built friendships.

Because of this homogeneous mixture of learning and entertainment, this project was an excellent example for the mission of the Erasmus+ programme.

Ana AMPOVA