Creative Rural Ideas for Young People Laboratory (RURAL LAB-Y)

The “RURAL LAB-Y” is a network of experimentation, essay and exchange of ideas, which integrates a Digital Platform for collaboration and management of Rural Good Practices, promoting the entrepreneurial spirit and the launching of pilot projects of local development in the European countryside.

A virtual space for dialogue, reflection and critical analysis where participants from rural areas can express themselves and show their potential and creativity, presenting problems to identify, investigate and innovate.

All this, through a program of activities that integrates training actions that should promote innovative, informal and non-formal training methods, with the scope of defining real work opportunities.

The activities that this project addresses will help its beneficiaries to reflect on social innovation, youth associations, perception and territorial organization, rural development, entrepreneurship and self-employment. Moreover, they will offer to young people, a diversified cultural approach, promoting professional skills in rural areas.

Main Objectives

• • Investment in Rural Communities
    Local resources, tangible and intangible heritage, the environment and traditional ways of life are elements that especially characterize rural areas and make them unique spaces. In this project, participants will have the opportunity to explore and experiment with differentiating ideas of the territory, and to convert them into a living laboratory, in a continuous and dynamic process.
  • Strengthening of Cooperation Networks
    This project allows the sharing of attractive and innovative resources and methodologies that present different social groups, agents and professionals in their daily practice, which generates the project’s own development, taking advantage of the opportunities offered by informal and non-formal education, promoting the exchange of ideas and good practices among all participants involved in this project, through a network of physical and virtual collaboration, at the transnational level.
  • Support for Small Initiatives
    Promoting entrepreneurship and self-employment in rural areas, allowing for the analysis of different proposals, opportunities for change, viability, sustainability, social impact, etc., through attractive youth proposals. The aim is to promote the creation of new business models that incorporate synergies through technology transfer and the development of innovative strategies, based on a flexible and open methodology.
  • Training and Mobility
    It offers participants the possibility to share experiences and experiences “with” and “from” others, as well as analyze the social reality of their communities, expose and contrast with other actors and peer groups, show their own cultural identity and learn about other European realities. Topics of concern and interest of the promoter group will be addressed, taking into account their needs, interests and motivations; challenging linguistic, geographical, social, economic, political, and cultural differences.
  • Digitalizing
    RURAL LAB-Y includes a Digital Platform of rural ideas and initiatives, for the dissemination of information, preparation of Good Practices manuals for online access, exchange of training strategies, development of entrepreneurship ideas, investor search, business training among other topics; fostering creativity, experimentation and enhancing skills development, which will further involve participants in European rural areas.

Duration of the project: 34 months (1st September 2018 – 30th June, 2022)