Alternative Ways of Funding and in Social Finances

Within the RAISE Young project FUNDECYT-PCTEX, together with Fundación Goteo, has organized a series of training sessions in these, held during the last week of May. These sessions aimed to give the partners of the consortium the capacity and knowledge needed to successfully design and implement crowdfunding campaign, capacity and knowledge that will later be transferred to young NEETs in rural areas. This way, it is expected that these young entrepreneurs will be able to successfully fund their own initiatives without having to depend on banks and other mainstreams ways of funding, going towards a more community-based way of doing and understanding business where in their very core, the entrepreneur and the community interact and have a positive impact on one another.

These “Training the trainers” sessions were divided in four modules, each with a very specific thematic focus: understanding the process of crowdfunding, its impact and its potential; the stages of the crowdfunding campaign and its elements; designing a communication and dissemination strategies for digital crowdfunding campaigns; and understanding matchfunding mechanisms and their impact as an alternative financing source.

It is important to note that these sessions were not merely theoretical, the content was approached from a practical point of view, with different group activities that made the attendees take the role of the promoters and try to convince the audience to invest in their own project, as well as different tools and graphics that could be used when the trainers pass this new knowledge to young NEETs.

Overall, the training sessions are receiving very positive feedback and prove to be a very valuable resource, not only for the partners of the Consortium, that are learning new things that have an immediate impact in their profession and skillset, but also to the young rural NEETs that will receive this knowledge imparted by the new Consortium’s trainers.