Eurostat estimates that 20,065 million men and women live in the EU-28; of whom 15,571 million in the Euro area were unemployed in December 2016. Among the Member States, the lowest unemployment rates in December 2016 were recorded in Czech Republic (3.5 %) and Germany (3.9 %). The highest rates were observed in Greece (23.0 % in October 2016), Spain (18.4 %) and Italy at 12%. Long-term unemployment is one of the main concerns of policymakers. Apart from its financial and social effects on personal life, long-term unemployment negatively affects social cohesion and, ultimately may hinder economic growth. In total, 5.1 % of the labour force in the EU-28 in 2016 had been unemployed for more than one year, more than half of those, 2.9 % of the labour force, had been unemployed for more than two years.
This project addresses an issue that is affecting not only some countries or regions but the whole of the EU, and for this reason, a common European solution, developed by a strong partnership coming from different parts of Europe is needed to help solve the problem.
New methodologies and new strategies need to be put in place to support long term unemployed people to re-entering the labour market following new tendencies.
The Europe 2020 strategy recognises that entrepreneurship and self-employment as key for achieving smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. Moreover, the top priority of the Commission is “to get Europe growing again and increase the number of jobs without creating new debt”.
In its support to entrepreneurship and self-employment, the European Commission focuses its efforts on: business start-ups by unemployed and people from vulnerable groups, support for social entrepreneurs; and micro-finance. They also seeks to: increase knowledge about entrepreneurship and self-employment; build capacity in EU countries and regions; and support entrepreneurship financially.
The Pop-up restaurant project is absolutely an innovative and effective occasion to encouarge learners start up their own business in a domain which is constantly increasing in all the countries of the project and across the EU.
The Pop-up restaurant project aims at “using self-entrepreneurship” as a means of employment. Entrepreneurship is high on the EU political agenda as a tool to combat unemployment and social exclusion as well as stimulating innovation among unemployed people and it is a key competence in the European Reference Framework on Key Competencies for Lifelong Learning (2006)
Primarily, this project requires transnational cooperation between Partners in order to apply the expertise necessary to translate our intentions into creating the most effective Outputs and Learning tools according to the objectives. In addition, the project aims for communities in as many countries as possible to benefit from the work of the project for the development of Adult Education in the way identified by the Pop-up project partners. For this to take place, there is a need for a strong international distribution of the curriculum and promotion of the Outputs that emerge from the project activities.
The so called Pop-up restaurants or underground restaurant is quickly becoming an alternative to traditional dining out, particularly in this difficult economic era. A Pop-up restaurant offers many of the same benefits as a traditional brick and mortar restaurant, without the high cost of overheads. Yet, these Pop-up restaurants are not only organising single dinners but real social events. The meeting places between Pop-up restaurants and customers come in special platforms. The widest Italian community is Gnammo.com, really appreciated along with KitchenParty.org. The movement of the Pop-up restaurants is increasing so much that in the worldwide platform Airbnb a service for booking Pop-up restaurants will soon be available.
On crowd funding sites, home restaurants is one of the most popular projects today. The possibilities of employment is increasing, hence this is why the Pop-up restaurant project aims at designing an online learning course available in all the languages of the partnership for use across Europe, especially in partner countries to train long-term unemployed to become self-entrepreneurs and the starting up of their own green business as a real and qualified job. The Pop-up restaurant curriculum will be based on standards of the European Qualification Framework for lifelong learning (EQF) in line with the ECVET procedures.
