From the 13th to the 16th of September 2022, it took place in Cinisello Balsamo the first training course promoted by Make it Grow!, a project financed by program Erasmus + - Capacity Building in the field of Youth, which has the Municipality of Cinisello Balsamo as leader.

The course, divided into two sessions (the first, the one just occured in person, and the second, online, scheduled for march 2023), is finalized at increasing the knowledge and the competences of the partecipants on the topic of social entrepreneurship and on the involvement of the community in projects with local impact. Another fundamental topic of the course is the strategies that the public administrators can adopt to support the spreading of an entrepreneur culture among new generations in an inclusive way; last but not least, are the digital and analog tools useful to develop and make sustainable the youth startups over time.

The 20 partecipants are young social entrepreneurs (or aspirant ones), youth workers and administrators from Italy, Albania, Bosnia Herzegovina and Turkey (all partner countries of the project).

This first part of the course included:

• activities of mutual knowledge and debate on the topic;
• the presentation of competence models (Youthpass and Entrecomp) that will be the base for the evaluation of the effective impact of the path on partecipants;
• a day dedicated to the deepening of themes as social entrepeneurship, the features/competences of social entrepeneurs (including those that distinguish it from the rest of the category) and Goals of Sustainable Development; this session was led by Luca Frongia, an expert of the field from the sardinian association TDM2000;
• a day, led by the experts of Meraki - Desideri Culturali, dedicated to the theme of the involvement of community and his "pillars" such as the trust and the listening;
• study-visit of projects supported thanks to the collaboration with the Municipality of Milan; have been in fact presented the experiences of realities such as:
  • QuBì, in the Niguarda neighborhood, a net of 26 private subjects who, depending on their individual areas of competence, faced the problems of the citizens of the 9th Municipality related to poverty, education and free time, under the supervision of social workers made available by the municipality itself; the project was financed in its two editions by an announcement of Fondazione Cariplo;
  • Molce Atelier, born thanks to the program "Scuola dei Quartieri" (School of Neighborhoods), through which the municipal administration supported citizen’s ideas and services in favor of the suburbs; Molce defines itself "therapeutic tailoring", hosting women victims of violence in its courses and in production of clothes;
  • Rob de Matt, restaurant and bistrot in the center of Dergano neighborhood, but also an association of social promotion, that is based on a project of social and working inclusion aimed at people with histories of marginalization and disadvantages (people with psychic discomfort, political refugees, migrants in difficulty, former prisoners, NEET);
  • So.De - Social Delivery, a project financed by the program of Civic Crowdfunding of the Municipality of Milan; this is the first ethic delivery of the city, that delivers home shopping, clothes, books, documents, furniture, with a particular attention to the topic of decent and protected work, in order to feed a virtuous circuit of conscious consumption and minimize the impact on the environment.

The last day of the course was instead dedicated to a multi-handed drafting of a document adressed to political administrators, where the results and the good practice collected during the training are descripted and transformed in useful recommendations to other public entities to increase the initiatives on the same topic, involving young social entrepreneurs and youth workers in the process.

There was no lack of entertaining moments, from the intercultural night hosted within the coworking space Cofò, to the partecipation of everyone at the initiative "Il Pertini è dei Giovani" (the Pertini belongs to the young), included in the program of celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Centro Culturale Cinisellese, from the presentation of opportunities abroad promoted by Eurodesk, to Dj sets.

If you want to know the results of the course, keep tracked our website: we’ll soon post a final report!