Sustainable Life Skills Café

Project number: 2021-1-DE02-KA220-ADU-000029423

The concept of “Sustainable Life Skills” can be elucidated in connection with internal capacities and behaviours that allow individuals to “build the needed competencies for human development and to adopt positive behaviours that enable them to deal effectively with the challenges. Sustainable life skills have a substantial effect on all aspects of life, especially social environment and business life. In the EU, disadvantaged groups including migrants, marginalized groups and low/semi-skilled adults are the most vulnerable part of the community in terms of lacking sustainable & soft skills or mindset. In this sense, considering relevant labour market integration challenges and the growing employer demand for soft skills, they are, beyond dispute, essential for social inclusion and integration of adults in challenging situations. Literacy difficulties and lack of sustainable life skills, restrict individual capabilities and prevent innovation. Thus, these skills affect work-life and duration of employment as well. This also means loss of or wasted workforce, which can be necessary for both socially including these groups into the business life and adding value to the EU economy. These groups need targeted support to meet these challenges. Sustainable Cafe will make an important contribution in this respect. Sustainable Cafe Project is framed around empowering adults and an interactive process of high-quality learning opportunities for disadvantaged adult groups, including low qualified, marginalized, socially excluded adults and migrants.

Sustainable Café aims to ensure social inclusion which will enable these adults to acquire knowledge to develop attitudes and skills and help them navigate through a business environment. We realized that adult learning activities in Sustainable life skills mostly are conducted technically, focusing on the teaching topic itself instead of how it

integrates with life and work challenges. Based on our previous experience on many projects with adult education, social and economic inclusion bodies, start-up consultants and support infrastructures, we are realising a great demand for this topic area. This highlights a need to revitalize the context and the methodology for a non-formal learning environment for adults previously and currently having barriers in educational, social and economic terms In this respect, Sustainable

Cafe Project’s concrete objectives are General: a) Low Qualified Adults as future active workers, entrepreneurs, employees will develop a sustainable life skills mindset and gain the relevant knowledge b) Adult education organisations, trainers, and support structures such as chambers or incubators are put in a position to sustainably professionalise their services and increase their impact. c) By actively supporting the potential active workforce in disadvantaged groups, we

create an important impact on the regional economy. Against the background of networked value chains across the EU, this will also impact the economy at national and EU level. d) Project partners will acquire new strategies, tools and methods for improving the effectiveness of their services. Specific: 1- Develop comprehensive toolbox, which presents

state of the art methods for the development of a Sustainable Life Skills Mindset and designed in a supportive simple and easy to understand way (WP1) 2- Establish Sustainable Cafes, providing a target group-specific, inspiring, low-threshold learning environment and develop a blueprint handbook that enables other organisations beyond the participating partner regions to implement the methodologies (W2) 3- Develop an interactive APP (WP3) working as both, content dissemination platform as well as interactive exchange and calendar/location tool, ensuring wide and free access of all produced resources