ARTpreneurship – Cyprus

Programme & action: ERASMUS+, Key Action 1: Training Course

Venue: Larnaca, Cyprus

Dates: 19 – 25 November 2016

Participants: Tereza Rýcová, Martina Baleková, Martin Mikeš

Please read the info-pack.

Participating countries: Albania, Azerbaijan, Czech Republic, Estonia, Italy, Lithuania, Slovakia, United Kingdom and Ukraine.

Hosting organisation: Seal Cyprus 

More photos from the project: www.facebook.com/sealngocy

Project report:

 Thanks to EYCB I got a great opportunity to participate in a training course in always sunny island of Cyprus. As the name of the project prompts „ARTpreneurship“, the training course was about entrepreneurship and how we can connect entrepreneurship with art. This project was hosted by a cypriot NGO Seal and took place in Larnaca, which is a town on the seaside with many shops, tavernas and cozy caffes where you can enjoy traditional cypriot frappe. This project gathered around 30 people from 9 countries and we got accommodated in a nice beach hotel where also all the activities took place.

The main topic of this TC was entrepreneurship and acquisition of competences in order to improve our personal development and employability.

We started with introduction of the project and the hosting organization, getting to know each other through name and ice breaking activities and variety of team building activities. We also discussed and establish the rules of the project. We made a suggestion box, where we could anonymously suggest what we would like to change or do during the next days and every day after the program we had an evaluation of the day in groups of few people.

At the beginning of the program we also got introduced Erasmus+ program and Youth pass. For many people it was a very first Erasmus+ project so they found this info very useful and informative.

Participants of this project were mostly starting entrepreneurs and (current or future) youth workers. We got divided into two groups: one group were people who wanted to become entrepreneurs and already had an idea about their future business and the other group were youth workers. First these groups worked separated. Entrepreneurs were discussing their entrepreneurial ideas (I was in the youth workers group so I do not know all the details ) and youth workers were developing theirs youth workers skills thought activities such as theatre for example, which was very interesting. Afterwards each future entrepreneur got paired with one (or two) youth workers and worked together in these mini groups on further development of their business ideas and making business plans- which each group presented to the others. We got also divided into “working groups” when one of the group was taking pictures during the workshops, others were making a project video, promoting the project on social media and journalist group writing report from the project.

Except activities and workshops we were also visited by the Commissioner for Volunteering and NGO in Cyprus, the founder of Youth Business Network Cyprus and local founders of start ups to learn about their work and discuss entrepreneurship and other topics connected to entrepreneurship with them. We visited EuropeDirect of the municipality of Larnaca and House of Volunteers to meet a social enterprise- we got introduced a “Freedom dolls initiative” which is a social enterprise dealing with human trafficking in Cyprus. Human trafficking is unfortunately a big deal in Cyprus which (almost) no one of the locals really wants to talk about or even admit that it exists in Cyprus and people from this initiative are doing a really great job.

This project was held in an easy going and friendly atmosphere, I liked that some of the activities took place on the beach and we also got a free afternoon to explore this beautiful island a bit more.

I am happy and thankful I could be a part of this project.

Tereza Rýcová