Fighting against poverty through Life Long Learning

Main components

Component 1: Empowerment of municipality leadership: ”Golden Skills” to Mayors and Municipality Leaders

The main purpose of this component is to create awareness among municipality leaders about how learning and competence development can enhance the capacity of the local community to cope with the challenges of social and economic aspects of life, how it can reduce the challenges of meeting the needs of the community within reduced budgets, how it can encourage economic development, and what roles can be played by local governments in promotion of lifelong learning and competence development. It is also the purpose of this component to offer short learning programmes to the same mayors and municipality leaders to improve their ICT and English language skills, fully contextualised to their situation and tailored to their needs. Such a training has two purposes: by joining such a learning program mayors can give an important sign to the public that they take LLL seriously, at the same time they also will have the opportunity to develop their basic competences in using ICT and English language in their work. Enhanced skills in English and ICT will also make international cooperation more feasible in the near future. Via the implementation of learning programme co-operation of local governments shall be encouraged.

Main activities:

• Why lifelong learning? 4 hour introductory seminar to mayors and municipality leaders

The seminar shall be an eye-opening event for the selected local governments. The seminar shall present how lifelong learning can be approached from the local government perspectives, cases from other countries where lifelong learning initiatives made tangible impact (”Learning cities”). Good practices identified in WP5 (Efficiency network) shall also be presented by selected Hungarian municipalities.

• ”Golden Skills” to Mayors and other municipality leaders – based on analyses of typical situations the Mayors face with during their normal working routine a competence profile shall be created focusing on basic ICT and English language skills  for those Mayors who have some but very limited skills. Offering a 20 hour tailored programme the participants shall be enabled to make a short introduction of themselves and their settlement in English, use ICT in their normal daily work routine for communication (Skype, e-mail etc), information source (internet) as well as making presentation (PowerPoint or Prezi.com). The learning process shall be organised as blended learning, using also e-learning and learning management applications (webinar). This makes possible for the involved Mayors to flexibly adjust learning to their schedule and gain a different and new experience how learning can take place using modern technology.

Expected outcomes:

• 45-50 mayors and municipality leaders shall be committed to promote adult learning in their community
• The mayors participating in the ”Golden skills” programme shall be enabled to carry out basic communication via the internet and
• to make a short introduction of themselves and their settlement in English

Component 2: Empowerment of the Citizens: Promoting Lifelong Long Learning and Social Entrepreneurship in the local community –  a training program for municipality officers

Purpose: enabling municipality officers to identify local needs and create local strategy in the field of promoting LLL and social entrepreneurship

The component will strongly focus on transferring tools and low budget solutions for the promotion of LLL and social entrepreneurship by introducing examples from Norway as well as from Hungary (Work Package 4 – Efficiency Network)

Main activities:

Develop an 50 hour competence development programmes to municipality officers that enables them to

Modul A – Promotion of LLL

-          identify local stakeholders of LLL and competence development needs

-          set up LLL strategic objectives and action plan via involving local stakeholders

-          to take concrete initiatives in the field of LLL, with special focus on active ageing, gender issues and social inclusion

 Modul B – Promotion of Social Entrepreneurship

-          to make situation analyses and explore potentials of social economy in the local arena together with local stakeholders

-          elaborating concrete plans on how to promote social companies and social enterpreneurship

-          taking concrete initiatives as part of the implementation of the plan

Participants shall be municipality officers responsible for education and/or social inclusion. Two persons have to take part from each applying local government, This ensures that learning take place at the workplace by applying the introduced approaches and tools directly in the practice. 

The competence development programme shall integrate project work which include elaboration of local strategies and action plans, implementing local initiatives (i.e. organisation of local learning festival or other events, community learning programmes, implementing need assessment, exploring market potentials or applying different tools to promote social entrepreneurship.) A small grant shall be provided (EUR 1000-4000) for those local governments or group of local governments who introduce clever, low budget ideas in their local action plans.

The training shall be implemented in 7 learning centres involving app. 50 municipalities and 100 municipality officers. The training shall consists of 5X2 day class room programme in the learning centre organized in every 2nd or 3rd week giving the possibility to participants to work on their own LLL strategy and action plans in cooperation with other stakeholders in the local community.

Expected outcomes:

-          100 municipality officers completed their local strategy and action plan on promotion of LLL and social entrepreneurship

-          small grant were provided and approximately 7 local small project successfully implemented

-          awareness of learning has increased in app. 50 local communities