Many young people in EU are experiencing a dangerous mix of high unemployment, increased inactivity and precarious work, as well as persistently high working poverty. More than 4.5 million young people (aged 15-24 years) are unemployed today in EU Member States. High youth unemployment co-exists sometimes with increased difficulties in filling vacancies due to mismatch of skills.The situation at present regarding youth unemployment in Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia and Turkey is worse than the average level in the EU which evidences labour market mismatches, due to inadequate skills and wage conditions. At the opposite pole is the situation in Belgium as project partner country where most of the youth employment and entrepreneurial indicators are much better.Our project aims to introduce youth to social cooperative entrepreneurship. Through the distinctive focus on values, cooperatives have proven themselves a resilient and viable business model that can prosper even during difficult times. Furthermore, the cooperative entrepreneurship model enables young people to create and manage sustainable enterprises. As such our suggested approach will offer youth a way out towards entrepreneurship and employment, while embracing social values, thus contributing also to society. Through the project, young people will explore the benefits of pursuing a social cooperative enterprise, to foster youth cooperative entrepreneurship with a social dimension, encouraging equally the cooperative movement to engage with youth. It also aims to bring together a group of cooperative experts, policy and decision makers, and youth organisation representatives in order to idenity how the cooperative entrepreneurship model can support youth.The project target groups are youth workers and leaders, youth organisation & student bodies members, student leaders, student bodies and youth entrepreneurs (e.g. JCI).The number of participants will be 250 young people during workshops on cooperative entrepreneurship, 60 young people in blended mobilities to exchange practices and visits to cooperatives, 200 people in workshops and meetings with entrepreneurs, cooperative experts, policy makers and youth organisation representatives.The project will provide the following activities:- Creation of a short “step by step” guide how to establish social cooperative entrepreneurship;- Information sessions on social cooperative entrepreneurship;- Blended mobilities to exchange practices on how social cooperatives are operating;- Workshops with entrepreneurial experts on how to stimulate the youth towards social cooperatives;- Popularising transborder social cooperative model among youth communities.The impact of the project:- Raised number of young people willing to be self-employed and establish or join social cooperatives;- Valuable transfer of best social cooperative practices and examples attractive to young people;- Increase of youth leaders and workers with knowledge on the social cooperative business model to encourage the youth in the transition from school to work;- Increase of young entrepreneurs as promoters of the cooperative idea among the youth;- Creation of sustainable partnership between youth organisations and social cooperatives to involve more young people into the idea of social cooperative entrepreneurship;- Networking of young people interested in cooperative work;- Long term cooperation between local community, cooperatives and youth organisation to raise youth employment and social inclusion. The introduction of the social cooperative entrepreneurship is relevant and usable across the EU and will have an immediate impact on the millions of members of youth organisations in Europe, whether they have difficulties to launch their career future in the labour market or they want to achieve more success in their current occupation. In addition, the project aims at impacting various regional/national umbrella organisations to spread the potential of the cooperative entrepreneurship among their members. The project is in support of the recommendations as was stressed in the Council conclusions on promoting youth entrepreneurship to foster social inclusion of young people (20 May 2014). In this context special attention is paid to the concept of ‘social entrepreneurship’, which is embedded in the real economy, close to people and to local communities (EU Youth Report 2015, p.42).Nine experienced partners from 5 countries (Turkey, Belgium, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia) participate, with backgrounds in youth, policy making, education, training, cooperatives, inclusion and social economy/entrepreneurship.