"Creating Opportunities: Social Entrepreneurship for Innovative Youth", koolitus Türgis

On the 12th of December I left Estonia for 8 days to attend a training course in Istanbul. The idea of this training was to educate young people and youth leaders in the field of entrepreneurship. Encourage them to release their creativity and to directly support them to develop and carry out their innovative ideas and to find solutions for employment.

These 8 days were full on laughter, motivation and inspiring people. Every day we had a chance to learn something new: discover something about ourselves or about being an entrepreneur. 

The first day was dedicated to introduction, some fun ice-breakers and challenging group-building exercises, in order to get to know each other. I was amazed how fast we managed to form the group feeling that made us feel united and comfortable with expressing our beliefs and ideas. Every person there had come with a reason, an urge to change something in their lives or in the society that would make the world a better place. I believe that is also the reason we connected with each other so well. 

On the second day we started to explore the topic more deeply. Starting with case studies about different organisations, defining their visions and goals in order to find out whether they were social enterprises or not. This lead to some interesting discussions, followed by value mapping exercise and finding differences between conventional and social enterprises. We also went through the idea realisation journey and thought about the problems and things we would like to change in our community. 

Third day was for analysing ourselves: the things we are passionate about, what we would be engaged with in a perfect world, how would we contribute to the society, what are our priorities and how we would like to work. That helped us put our ideas into words and on the paper. After everyone had got their posters ready, we started discussing the ideas in small groups and made the SWOT analysis for our idea. One important thought of the day that was: “Never judge anyone's idea!” It's good to give advice and ask questions, but not to judge. We also discussed about theory of change and problem solving. It's not possible to solve a problem by thinking about the problem. In order to solve a problem, you need to think about the solutions and step out of your comfort zone – take opportunities, chances, even risks. For moving borders you need to think beyond the level of what's possible. There is no such thing as failing – there's even a new word for that: “nearling” - trying and not succeeding, but it was still worth it, because you got an experience that gave you new knowledge and skills. Quote of the day: “Impossible ideas make the world go round.” 

The fourth and fifth day were for identifying our locus of control, meaning how much we think we have the power to influence our lives and the world we live in. We defined key characteristics of an entrepreneur and came to a conclusion that in many cases creativity equals entrepreneurship. Every person has an inner leader/ child, a creative Self who knows no limits, shows the way, creates visions, understands emotions, trusts intuition and dwells in the mystery. On the contrary there is also the inner conservative Self, an adult, who hates changes, is logical, practical, perfectionist and wants to feel safe. Herewith occurs that being a creative individual means contradiction and complexity. This means combining childishness with wisdom, playfulness with discipline, pride with humility, objectivity with passion, masculinity with femininity, etc.

Kaisa Hansen