Funding Programme: Erasmus+

Duration: January 2021 – December 2022 (24 months)

Website: https://www.incrowdproject.eu/

Description: "InCrowd" - Inclusion through Crowdfunding - is a project aimed to empower the "NEET" (Neither in Employment nor in Education or Training) young people, between 18 and 30 years old, with a new and innovative form of self-expression and economic determination: crowdfunding.

In the current precarious EU labour market, young people often suffer from a lack of guidance and direction to start their own professional career, often resulting in a failure or even a complete undone. This is particularly the case for those youngsters coming from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The INCrowd project wants to offer those young people a new and innovative tool to make their voices heard and to enjoy the opportunity to participate as engaged and committed people in the development of more inclusive and active communities and cities. It will do so by offering crowdfunding as a disruptive and powerful instrument for starting a social innovation project, as well as for collecting funds and engaging citizens.

Our role:

EUROCROWD strongly supports facilitating access to finance for ideas and projects leading to opportunities for young people. To achieve this, education, practical training and best practices on crowdfunding are an important means. For this reason, EUROCROWD will support establishing a training course composed of three different modules that will be carried out in different countries, and provide a thorough and unbiased understanding of crowdfunding to young entrepreneurs coming from a disadvantaged background and, more broadly, NEETs that have an interest in this specific financing tool.

Furthermore, EUROCROWD is responsible for leading the evaluation and exploitation tasks and will act as technical partner supporting the local labs in designing and delivering the crowdfunding capacity building programme. In addition, EUROCROWD will contribute to the dissemination of the project at European level, promoting the project using its extensive network.

Expected results:

• Support access to finance for young people and their ideas
• Increase the capacities of young people to have an impact in their territories.
• Assess opportunities behind crowdfunding and its specific application to social innovation.
• Explore the possibility to integrate crowdfunding into existing public and private funding schemes.
• Empowering youngsters with tools that will allow them to make their ideas become projects through crowdfunding.

Project partners:

Fondazione Fenice, Italy (Project Coordinator)

European Crowdfunding Network (EUROCROWD), Belgium

ZAAR, Malta

Growfunding, Belgium

University of Rijeka (UNIRI), Croatia

University of Rijeka- Faculty of Economics and Business (EFRI), Croatia

Tree, Estonia