Working with Europe/Treballant amb Europa Associació
Working with Europe is a non-profit association established by a group of professionals from different countries who have been working together for many years in different forms of European collaboration. The association is based in Catalonia, but works with partners from all over Europe. Basically it was established for the following reasons:
- European collaboration and funding activity at all levels increasingly request professional competences and experience, also as a consequence of increasing competition and more complex project and innovation challenges
- Very many organisations across Europe are dedicated to participate in European collaboration and innovation, but are not able to manage the demanding application work and to manage all aspects of the projects
- The long-term outcomes and sustainability of many European projects are not satisfactory and do not deliver value for money; this calls for increased professionally in for example the fields of quality assurance, usability, evaluation, sustainability and exploitationWwEU was therefore established with the mission to deliver high quality application support as well as high quality support along the projects to ensure valuable and sustainable outcomes.
The associations’ capacity and experience builds on more than 10 years of intensive participation in application production and project management in more than 50 European projects, among them several rewarded innovation projects, and the association has more than 200 partners from almost all European member states. Furthermore, professionals in the association are leading debaters in for example the global UNESCO Learning Cities network and discussions of 21st century learning, social innovation and entrepreneurial education, including collaboration with the Commission’s Joint Research Center on several occasions.
The members of the association have carried out quality assurance, evaluation, exploitation and sustainability tasks in a long line of projects, and are known among European professionals to increase the quality of a project with 30-40%.
WwEU works in collaborative projects addressing very different forms of innovation, but the core capacity and expertise of the association and its professionals is to design and implement quality programs in projects missioned to engage in the following challenges:
- Innovative solutions for unemployed adults and NEET youth including long term capacity building
- Creative use of technology and media to promote technology fluency
- Developing 21st century learning didactics to replace traditional education
- Entrepreneurship in formal and non-formal education
- Cross-sector collaboration and joining forces to solve community needs
- Social innovation driven by citizens
- Learning cities and communities
The overarching aims of the association’s quality work in such projects are to:
- deliver quality measures to ensure authentic innovation- ensure a strong contribution to Commission policy and programs
- counter tendencies to deliver “more of the same”
- offer pro-active evaluation helping the project to progress and reach its aims, for example by foreseeing threats and obstacles
- ensure a high usability beyond project for target audiences
- support the generation of useful knowledge from the project practice, transformed into valuable outcomes
- contribute to sustainability strategies and measures early in and along the project
- contribute to beyond project exploitation of the project, including at local and European levels
WwEU was collaborating with the Commission’s development of the EUROPEAN ENTREPRENEURIAL COMPETENCE FRAMEWORK and the WwEU contributions have been included in the Commission’s final productions: EntreComp – The Entrepreneurship Competence Framework.
