The INITIATION project aims to cultivate the social innovation and social entrepreneurship mind-set of high schools and their motivation to become more community oriented and be actively involved in designing solutions for environmental problems that their local societies are facing. Thus, high school students and teachers are the main beneficiaries of the project. To achieve the aforementioned objectives, INITIATION will implement the following activities and produce relevant results:

• Design a methodological framework and a curriculum for high school students’ education and training in social entrepreneurship and social innovation for solving environmental problems adaptable to local/regional contexts.
• Develop tailor made learning resources for the effective participation of high schools students in the provision of solutions to environmental problems by applying the model of social entrepreneurship.
• Develop a web-based Digital Platform for Schools Social Entrepreneurship to be used as a tool that actively supports and develops high schools students’ social entrepreneurship and social innovation thinking.
• Pilot the curriculum, learning resources and digital platform at 4 national pilots. Prior to the pilots, develop a teachers handbook and train the high schools teachers to gain skills & knowledge on how they could effectively support their students to be involved in social entrepreneurship endeavours.
• Make recommendations for the exploitation of the proposed approach of INITIATION project and its results.

Through the proposed intervention, it is expected that high school students under the guidance of their teachers, will gain the necessary knowledge for developing social entrepreneurship and social innovation mind-sets to provide sustainable solutions to environmental problems. Moreover, teachers will gain the necessary competences to support their students to implement the entire process from the identification of environmental problems to the setup of social entrepreneurship endeavors.

The project will also benefit actors of the social economy ecosystem (HEIs, social enterprises, SE policy makers, organizations supporting SE, etc.) through co-creation of knowledge and exchange of expertise with school communities and inspiration from fresh ideas coming from future social entrepreneurship actors on solving environmental problems.

Last but not least, national, regional and local education authorities, as well as policy makers, will increase their ability to exploit ready-to-use tools and resources to develop strategies for the effective integration of social entrepreneurship in secondary education..