Coopérer pour Entreprendre

The Youth Cooperative of Services (CJS in French) is a national informal educational project, based on active teaching, and aiming to promote coooperative entrepreneurship to young people as to develop their professional skills, increase their self-confidence and initiate them to collective ways of working. The model has been experimented in France since 2013 after being imported from Canada where it has been successfully implemented for the last 30 years. How does it work? > During the summer holidays, with the support from local authorities and local partners (youth associations, employment support agencies, committed citizens..) a youth cooperative is created and implemented, covering and serving a defined geographic area. > This cooperative enables a group of 15 young persons to offer their own services to the local residents in a democratic way where they manage and allocate the different responsibilities to each other. > This group is supported by 2 youth leaders, trained in the specific CJS pedagogy, who work with them on the day to day running of the cooperative. The Youth Cooperative of Services is a social innovation project quickly expanding in France. It started with 3 cooperatives in 2013 and we now count over 30 in 2016 accross different regions of the country. We would like to disseminate the model working with other strategic partners to find and exchange on good practices. We are also interesting to partner up with organisations that have an expertise in scaling up social innovation, in relating social businesses with youth entrepreunership and in other European based youth projects aiming to develop professional skills applying a "learning by doing" approach.