On the 7th of December 2022 Social Entrepreneurship MA students conducted a social entrepreneurship workshop. The workshop centred around business plan development was organised by 6 SEMA students to 36 high school students (aged 14-19) in the framework of their project management course.
The high school students came to Estonia as part of the Erasmus + educational cooperation project “United Colors of Young European Businessmen” which is led by MTÜ Rabarada in Estonia including students of Audentes International School program and 14 teachers in total. The other partners are from Spain, Turkey, Portugal, North-Macedonia, Greek School in London.
All the students took part in a business development competition supported by the SEMA students in groups of five teams selected by the supervisors. Each of the teams was led by the 2nd year SEMA student as their mentor. The event started with welcoming the students at Tallinn University by Katri-Liis Lepik with a brief introduction to the Social entrepreneurship Masters Program, which she leads. It was followed by the experiential story of a social enterprise by its founder and manager David Parks who is also a lecturer in the SEMA program. SEMA students worked as facilitators for the young learners as they guided the students on how to utilize the business canvas model to develop their entrepreneurial idea. The Erasmus program participants were enthusiastic and very talented as they pitched ideas developed from the scratch in front of the jury. The ideas ranged from online platforms to creating jobs for the youth. The jury consisting of the teachers chose two winning teams and gave prizes to team developing the E-health care system and the one tackling the rising cost of living from inflation.
Hopefully the implementation of the example social entrepreneurship course raised the interest of students about Tallinn University who are looking for future opportunities in higher education.