VAP – Value Adding Projects

Value Adding Projects

Lead partner:

NITIN – Nordisk Institutt for Trening og Internasjonalt Nettverk (Denmark)

Other Partners of the consortium:

InterCollege (UK) Ltd
InterCollege ApS
Ananda Cooperativa Cultural Crl
Asociatia EIVA
Vitale Tecnologie Telecomunicazioni – Viteco S.r.l.

Background:

The introduction of the new Erasmus + Programme has not been an easy transition for NGO’s within the European Union. It is substantially more complicated and longer than the previous programmes and it requires a high level of background knowledge to be fully understood.
Once the organizations manage to acquire all the necessary information about the new programmes the next challenges rise when they intend to implement it in their organizations. It requires a strong organizational capacity with competent project managers with advanced project management tools. Although there is a lot of material on different project management approaches, they are all designed for organizations that don’t require a 3rd party to finance their projects. This lack of Project Management Standards for NGO’s (or for donor financed projects) causes difficulties for organizations in their efforts to successfully implement the new Programmes.

Project Aims and Objectives:

The aim of this project is to fundamentally strengthen NGO’s capacities to take potent/influential actions in the frameworks of the Erasmus + Programme.

The objectives are:

To enable organizations to easily understand the Erasmus + Programme, the Europe 2020 Strategy, the ET 2020 and other important EU Policies;
-To strengthen the organizations ability to address successfully the objectives outlined by Erasmus + Programme, the Europe 2020 Strategy, the ET 2020 and other important EU Policies;
-To enable organizations to satisfy the needs of all of their stakeholders;
-To provide organizations with efficient Project Management methods and standards that focus on efficiently aligning the EU Policies with local needs.
-To create a compendium of Europe 2020 Strategy, ET 2020 and other EU Policies
-To create a compendium of the Erasmus + Programme
-To create user-friendly guides for Europe 2020 Strategy, ET 2020 and other EU Policies
-To create user-friendly guides for the Erasmus + Programme
-To research Project Management methods and set up Project Management Standards for projects within the framework of the Erasmus + Programme
-To research and document best Project Management experiences as well as common mistakes.

Target Group:

The target group of this project is NGO leaders, youth leaders, teachers and project managers working in NGO’s who have less experience to efficiently interpret and implement the new Erasmus + Programme and other complex documents that are referenced in it. These managers are really passionate in their fields, let it be the field of human rights, gender equality or social inclusion, (etc.) and they invest their time and knowledge to tackle these specific problems. They are doing their best to make a change around them in the fields where they are experts. However, these talented and enthusiastic people are set back or even disrupted by the exceedingly complicated programme guidelines that require a great amount of background knowledge, time and energy to be fully understood and put into practice properly.
These devoted NGO leaders, teachers, youth leaders and project managers are also hindered by the lack of a standardized project management process that satisfies their unique needs. In many cases, the project management methods used by NGO’s fail to address all the problems that occur during the project planning phase because they are not taking into consideration the special requirements of EU programmes. This project targets those project managers who are frustrated by the existing and often misleading project management tools that cause the failure of otherwise ingenious ideas.