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Description
The need of greater commitment in the field of green solutions is growing due to exhaustion of natural resources and environmental pollution. The emergence of more and more businesses addressing these issues has led to the rise of many “green” professions that are still not attractive enough as a career choice among young people in Bulgaria. What is more, young people are not sufficiently engaged with environmental initiatives and organizations. The project aims at building awareness among young people of the global challenges and knowledge and skills to deal with them as well as encouraging generation of innovative ideas that can be applied in practice through introducing the best practices from Norway and establishing the Norwegian approach to building partnerships between the state, civil society organizations (CSOs), the private business and schools. The planned training activities will boost the capacity of 520 young people, 26 teachers and representatives of 8-10 CSOs, businesses and public institutions in the field of environment protection and green innovation. A number of events are planned aiming to make contacts and exchange ideas between Norwegian and Bulgarian CSOs, companies, the state and schools as well as introduce the best Norwegian practices in education. Cross-border teams will be set up to implement innovative ideas to fight climate change and the best of them will have the opportunity to apply in the accelerator of one of the Norwegian partners. We plan to reach at least 10 partnership agreements with Bulgarian and Norwegian stakeholders, train Bulgarian and Norwegian students in green entrepreneurship, hold the festival Learning by Doing and Sustainable Development, carry out cross-border green initiatives, go on a study trip to Norway and learn about eco innovations as well as promote the achieved results among all the stakeholders.
Summary of project results
The bilateral project “Green cooperation beyond borders” (BG-ACTIVECITIZENS-0056) is implemented by Junior Achievement Bulgaria, Entrepreneurship Sogn og Fjordane Norway, Green Business Norway and Nordic Innovation Hub Bulgaria. The participants of the project, young people from Bulgaria and Norway, underwent a specially designed experiential training program in green entrepreneurship, which built their understanding of the global environmental challenges, what role they can play in the sustainable development, the circular economy and the sustainable business. Following, the youngsters were encouraged to generate innovative ideas for green entrepreneurship with practical application. The project set up a network of supporting organisations (big companies and green start-ups), the employees of which provided guidance and mentoring for the participants. On-line and live meetings between the participants of Bulgaria and Norway gave chance for experience exchange and idea sharing, including a lot of inspiration for the green ideas of the youngsters. The project "Green Cooperation Beyond Borders" managed to engage participants from Bulgaria and Norway - 23 teachers, over 500 students, 27 mentors and 47 successful student teams, who never ceased to amaze with their ingenious green ideas.
Summary of bilateral results
Our partners from Norway played a key role in the implementation of international cooperation and the involvement of participants and experts from Norway. Within the activities together we created opportunities during online meetings, webinars, the Virtual Fair of Ideas, the Festival, a series of activities called Bridge Green Ideas, to exchange information between Bulgaria and Norway, as well as to learn about good examples from Norway in the field of environment and green technologies. The important lessons for us came and because of the need to adapt the activities due to the pandemic, they led to increased flexibility, creativity and resilience of the team.In Norway, the learning process has been severely hampered since the pandemic, which has prevented green entrepreneurship classes from starting even online in the spring of 2020, and in the autumn they began to move slowly until schools closed again. at the beginning of January 2021. In Bulgaria we managed to conduct a combination of online classes and webinars, as well as to start the process of team building and generating ideas from activity 4. Despite our difficulties, our great achievement is that several Norwegian teams were formed. students and teachers from there actively participated in all the webinars in English that we offered during the autumn season, also eagerly participated in online consultations with mentors and received valuable feedback on their team ideas.