First meeting of Gloucestershire Leonardo project

Gloucestershire County Council’s Adult Education Service has been awarded in 2009 a Leonardo Partnership bid for improving self employment skills for disabled people through social enterprise. The project involves partners in Sweden, Germany, Turkey, Italy, Slovakia and France.

The project aims to set up a web based toolkit showcasing good practice and, drawing on partner experience, it will flag up tips and pitfalls for others to share. The toolkit will be developed through the partners visiting social enterprises, or the equivalent, in other countries and carrying out intensive case studies.

The first meeting of this project took place in Gloucester from the 4 – 8 November. This meeting has allowed partners to get to know each other and find out how their organisations work in their own countries. Unfortunately not all partners could attend but there was representation from Sweden, Germany, Slovakia and Spain. The main purpose of the meeting was to establish a work plan and time line for the next 18 months. There was also the need to agree upon common language and to develop the criteria to be used during the life time of the project for undertaking the case studies. The project will use AdEd’s VLE for communication, discussion and planning between visits.

This project bid is a natural development of a curtain raising project called ‘Life Chances’ which took partners from Gloucestershire to study supported employment models in Aachen in Germany, Adana in Turkey and Vasteras in Sweden.

For more information please contact Jane Griffiths