More about Street Culture For Regions

Street culture is a rapidly evolving area of economic activity and includes urban arts and creative industries (e.g. pop culture), fashion, food, tourism and more, all of which offer opportunities for innovative, entrepreneurial start-ups. However, given its informal roots and sometimes negative connotations, it has not been “on the radar” for focused enterprise development.

Street Culture for Regions (SCR) will change this by guiding and equipping entrepreneurship education providers to make the most of street culture opportunities for skills’ development and economic and social inclusion in our cities and regions.

SCR will make a compelling and very tangible contribution to SOCIAL INCLUSION. By using the relatability and attractiveness of street culture as a potential business area, we will bring those on the margins of society – NEETs, those from ethnic minorities or migrant backgrounds, and those from deprived neighbourhoods – into both entrepreneurship training and meaningful economic activity.

SCR has been carefully designed to produce a series of results which deliver positive outcomes in terms of skills development for potential entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship educators, as well as boosting our capacity for innovation and inclusion within our wider vocational education system.

The most tangible results emerging from the project will be our resources, each of which has a specific target group(s) in mind and fulfil a specific objective in terms of attitudinal change, knowledge acquisition and/or skills development.

  • Opportunities in Street Culture Resource Pack. A set of documents, multimedia resources and interactive activities that enables entrepreneurship stakeholders, leaders and educators to understand how street culture can be harnessed as part of entrepreneurial skills’ development.
  • Street Culture Alliances & Action Plans. A guide to implementing ongoing collaboration between key organisations and stakeholders so that investment in street culture entrepreneurship training can create a sustainable impact on social inclusion and cultural-economic development.
  • Street Culture Open Education Resources. The hub of the new street entrepreneurship training model, resources include a first-ever dedicated curriculum.

These materials will be developed by our team of experts, our project has a clear aim: introduce a brand new programme of enterprise skills development in the field of street culture entrepreneurship. Our goals and target groups are:

  1. Raise the motivation and knowledge of VET LEADERS AND STAKEHOLDERS to offer opportunities for street culture entrepreneurship and to work inter-sectorally to provide joined up support. This responds to VET and economic development stakeholders that want to boost entrepreneurial innovation, social inclusion, and urban revitalization in a context of increasing cultural diversity and need guidance on how to harness street culture across the public and private sectors for these purposes.
  2. Equip VET EDUCATORS to introduce effective street culture entrepreneurship training in their organisations in the short term. VET educators and leaders wish to achieve better outcomes with hard-to-reach groups, but this cannot be achieved with old-school generic start-a-business courses. They need relevant up-to-date knowledge, effective digital tools and engaging pedagogic approaches that build entrepreneurial skills appropriate for contemporary urban environments.
  3. Develop the business skills of NEW ENTREPRENEURS who are normally alienated from VET because of their low-skills background or status as NEETs or migrants. As a low-capital venture that requires cultural identity and organic digital marketing, street culture businesses are ideally suited for them, but they need customised flexible training that builds their confidence and skills to move forward as entrepreneurs.

Our cities – Belfast, Bordeaux, Porto, Athens, Lodz and Galway have more in common with each other in terms of engaging with multiculturality and emerging cultural scenes, and tackling unemployment and marginalization, than we do with regions in our own countries. At the core of our transnational motivation, while the interface of enterprise and social inclusion is now a recognised area of expertise, it is hard to find organisations whose commitment to inclusion does not compromise their results in entrepreneurial skills development (or vice versa). We believe that by joining forces with multi-faceted partners across Europe with demonstrated expertise in contemporary culture, vocational education and social diversity, we will be able to leverage a much more nuanced and in-depth understanding of the issues facing aspiring urban entrepreneurs and produce tools for same.