Senior+: educational communities to boost business opportunities for unemployed people over 55 years old through entrepreneurship.
SENIOR+ gathers 6 organizations from France, Spain, Italy, Lithuania, Greece, and Cyprus willing to cooperate to define strategies and tools for senior entrepreneurship, especially for the ones at risk of exclusion.
Senior+ project partnership is glad to launch the new project website: www.seniorplusproject.eu.
Through the web platform we will share all the steps and outputs of the 30 months pan-European Erasmus+ project, funded by the French national agency, aiming at improving the lives of elderly people, by implementing innovative practices in the field of entrepreneurship.
The European workforce is getting older: the proportion of the labour force between 55 and 69 years old increased 26.5 % between 1987 and 2010. However, few older people are involved in entrepreneurship, particularly women, and their enterprises tend to be less growth oriented than firms of younger entrepreneurs. Data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor suggest that older people, like entrepreneurs from the adult population, are driven more by opportunities than necessity. However, the COVID-19 crisis could change this data and push more persons over 55 years old that have lost their job or incomes because of the pandemic, to start up their own businesses.
Many studies have recognised the role of entrepreneurship in poverty alleviation, enabling people from disadvantaged backgrounds, such as older adults 50+, to break out of their inferior positions and find their own solution to unemployment or discrimination in the labour market. At the same time as acquiring these new skills and competencies necessary for entrepreneurship, our target groups will also receive training in social value creation from a business.
Thanks to SENIOR+, the social world, together with the business world, will identify which market niches exist in the different business sectors. Vulnerable older adults 50+ will create social and inclusive enterprises to meet these needs and this, in turn, will establish a powerful link between the people involved, the older adults 50+ and the business professionals.
Senior+partners will design:
1 A Methodological toolkit to involve business and social professionals in entrepreneurship programs;
2 An online training on digital competences and skills for entrepreneurship that will help participants to acquire basic competences and skills;
3 A digital bank of business ideas for people 55+, filled with sustainable, quickly profitable, highly replicable potential business models;
4 A digital environment for business incubation and mentoring, that will identify and organize digital tools and solutions available to support sustainable incubation processes.
The kick-off online meeting of the SeniorVlog project took place on the 8th of February. During the meeting, partners presented the work plan, got to know each other, learned more about the respective national contexts and agreed on the upcoming tasks. The partnership is now moving on gathering information from the professionals for the methodological toolkit.