Advancing the Third Sector through Innovation and Variation (ATSIV)

ATSIV supports the efforts of the EU to boost adult education in the NGO sector (AENGO) by improving the quality and relevance of NGO workers' skills (including digital) across Europe in a multi-stakeholder, open innovation & co-creation approach, strengthening quality through mobility and cross-border cooperation and boosting social cohesion trough active stakeholder engagement in the project's outputs development.

According to the OECD, adult skills and in particular civic engagement skills by capitalizing on NGOs form an integral part of adult education - next to literacy and numeracy. In a social system where civic engagement, active citizenship and social cohesion are key to growth, developing such basic skills through adult education becomes critical. These are skills for life highly required for adult education and through ATSIV, adult NGO staff will gain the necessary skills to promote civic engagement and active citizenship having NGOs as central pillars.

In order to achieve this aim, the following targets will be achieved through the following actions:

* Co-creation withquadruple helix stakeholders (society, policy makers, NGO workers, industry, academia, etc) in an open innovation manner - game based curricula that will enable NGO workers to upgrade their competences with inputs from all stakeholders in which their operational areas take place - leading to immediate impact that results in improved NGO operation and increased impact in active citizenship and social cohesion (a change of image for NGOs which will become more appealing for society as an employment choice as well as for other stakeholders such as industries as a direction of philanthropy).

* Develop an open virtual learning/co-creation & training environment - VLE in order to support virtual mobility towards enabling active citizenship and social cohesion, reduce financial & disability barriers to transnational cooperation and effectively integrate ICT/digital solutions in AENGO. The VLE will be a co-creation and open innovation space that can be used by all societal and NGO stakeholders toaccess the cutting edge game-based curriculum, best practices, and materials developed through ATSIV as well as to participate in the forum/co-creation process for improving/validating the on-line material.

* Through the VLE, ATSIV promotes the development of innovative and open adult education, in particular the integration of a greater variety of study modes (distance, part-time, modular learning) through, strategic use of open educational resources, virtual mobility, blended mobility and virtual learning platforms; as well as it stimulates the internationalisation of Europe’s AENGO education systems in Europe and beyond in a very cost-effective and sustainable manner for various target groups - maximizing thus the impact of ATSIV's outputs for current and future AENGO workers around the globe.

The project is implemented under the framework of the European Commissions’ Programme Erasmus+, within Key Action 2: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices, Action: Strategic partnership for adult education. Bulgaria is in partnership with 6 other partners from 4 different countries.

As a project partner, Law and Internet Foundation is responsible for the development of Intellectual Output 1 - Training needs analysis and best practices benchmarking.

Online platform of ATSIV project