Stay-on: a community-based and driven project

Description

StayOn''s ultimate objective is to create conditions that enable young people to "stay on" rural areas by ensuring access to opportunities, benefits, services, and jobs. To do so, the project:

1. Engages at least 1,100 participants that will experience social inclusion by undertaking a path that begins with training and coaching, providing them with adequate skills for the rural labour market, such as digital literacy, managing environmental impacts, and personal development skills.
2. Assists at least 10 rural communities across Greece, Ireland, Italy, Poland, and Portugal in adopting community-based development, a participatory approach fostering collective action in communities by putting them in control of innovation. The project partners will engage community shapers in "co-innovation labs" to create a service/product or valuable idea for society. Local companies will support NEETs in realizing this step, increasing their soft skills and improving their employability.
3. Fosters increased transnational cooperation on labour market issues among the eight project partners, their networks, and other stakeholders by sharing information, knowledge, and experience to develop joint solutions to common challenges, guaranteeing a long-term impact well beyond the project''s life. 

StayOn also foresees developing a shared train-the-coaches program, implementing a relationship-building model within the consortium, conducting research resulting in a book on transnational cooperation, and creating the European Rural Youth Alliance.
For these purposes, the project relies on a range of inputs, including the project partners'' experience and expertise, their ability to cooperate on labour market issues, their capacity to leverage existing and new local networks, and the participants'' engagement and ideas.

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Summary of project results

The youth unemployment rate in EU stands at 14.8%. Youth in rural areas and especially NEETs are at a higher risk of youth unemployment and are falling into demanding situations due to the lack of opportunities and inequality of access.

Throughout the lifetime of the Stay On project, the project’s partners were in a position to offer new, engaging opportunities for young people, particularly NEETs to participate in. Stay On accomplished the next key results:

1. The Stay On Partnership coached, trained more than 1400 young people and NEETs in 54 unique courses that focused on a range of different topics including Job Readiness, CV Writing Skills, Digital Skills, AI, Cybersecurity Training and Beauty Care training to name but a few.
2. 18 social co-Innovation living Labs engaged NEETs to the creative co-creation of products, services.
3. All partners hosted Community Catalyst sessions involving members of the community, predominantly the key target groups.
4. The project proposed and promoted a range of policies (15 policies) to highlight the key issues affecting the young people in rural areas in Ireland, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Greece.
5. The partners developed skills of trainers and coaches. The results include a train-of-trainers program on personal development, individual, group, national supervision activities, bootcamps, coaching manuals, development of the card game “the Shapers”, and the ‘Community Shapers Playbook: A toolbox for developing better futures’.
6. The project implemented an impact management strategy with which the partners developed the StayOn Theory of Change, the StayOn Impact compass and the StayOn Impact Watch facilitating, collecting and evaluating data on current and future labor market needs to identify potentials and implementing support solutions for orienting NEETs orientation.
7. The partners established the “European Rural Youth Alliance”, a European network of young people who live in rural areas, in order to increase rural youth empowerment and cooperation between different European countries who are facing similar issues.  

The project has achieved the following:

1. Developed new approaches and tools to support the development of skills for NEETs, succeeding in upskilling and motivating more than 1400 NEETs in 5 countries and changed the situation depicted in the full proposal.
2. Implemented an approach of coaching as a methodology, which was new for the countries, and the development of train-the-coaches manual to support the effectiveness of training programs and bottom-up NEET engagement.
3. Implemented living co-innovation labs, community based learning designed by the learners for the learners, and adopted innovative learning and relationship-building tools;
4. Developed high level of trust, communication and cooperation between the partners from regions facing similar problems with ‘rural flight’ which was absent.
5. Built an integrated impact management system to maximize impact and to the benefit of the project partners/policymakers by collectively developing StayOn Theory of Change, the StayOn Impact Compass, the Academic Book to the benefit of European project designers, managers, funding mechanisms, and European institutions.
6. Created a communication platform, the Youth Employment Forum, to promote interactions of among people and organizations and foster collaborative learning on youth employment issues.
7. Achieved the creation of the first “European Rural Youth Alliance”, which was necessary in respect with the situation described in the proposal.