ASOCIACION BUILDING BRIDGES

descripción de la organización:

Building Bridges Cultural Association was founded in 2008 to promote a spirit and community integration and to foster European culture awareness to young people. Building Bridges is presented at local level as a tool to assist and support the implementation of non formal education courses and improving knowledge of European labour system practices. We organise courses, seminars, workshops, visits and meetings, European events for public agencies on policies concerning youth , mobility, sports , local economic development , culture and cooperation with developing countries. We also provide online training courses. We believe that transnational experience could offer young people the opportunity to grow within a European dimension through their personal and professional skills , so that they could become main actors of the European future.

Since its foundation, the association has participated in several information, guiding and councelling wordkshops fostering promotion of European mobility. Its members have a wide mobility experience as trainers for more than 10 years.

Our aims are:



-To build bridges and promote the social construction of Europe

-To build bridges and promote intercultural dialogue and favour understanding of foreign cultures.

-Plan bridges using European projects to promote participation.

-Step on bridges to support any cultural, educative and/or artistic expression based on the previous values.



TARGET GROUP

We work with organisations in the fields of culture, education and youth, so we have a wide target group. In general, we focus on anyone interested in art, culture, heritage and Europe issues, specially those looking for an experience abroad and in need of a grant or funding. This group involves people of all ages and backgrounds, however we are specialised in youth: most of our users are long term unemployed people, with very few opportunities to get funding for developing studying and working activities in Spain or abroad.



ACTIVITIES

All our activities pursue our aim: provide information, guidance and counselling to young people according to the following principles:



- Promote intercultural dialogue and foster understanding of foreign cultures.

- Educate young people towards an active European citizenship.

- Support any cultural, educative and/or artistic expression based on the previous values.

- Promote the social construction of Europe



Our activities include:



1. Youth information

Our members include people who have participated in different programmes: EVS, Leonardo, Erasmus, European Social Fund... and we want to offer such chances to other young people.





2. Employment for graduates: Counselling and Information

Our aim is to support, inform and guide graduates so they can gain qualifications and access the labour market.

We are specialist in providing employment European information and guidance, especially about UK. There is a high demand about this services, often not covered. There are many grants and traineeships, unfortunately unknown for students.





3. Youth cultural resources

Although there is several online information, people not always find what they are looking for. We have created several communication channels ( Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter) including information about grants, support, funding and grants related to culture and arts.



4. Training

We offer training courses in the field of cultural management, for example:

- Enterpreneurship courses , creation of cultural companies, associations and social enterprises

- Strategies to search information in the web

- Language courses

- Studying and working abroad





5. Cultural activities

We actively collaborate with the portal FabricaCultural, providing content in order to reach more than 40.000 of their users. We also participate with Bookcrossing Madrid in promoting reading activities. This is a free exchange of books world-wide, with over 34,000 members in Spain. In the last years , we have released over 400 books for it all over Spain, cooperating with Museo of America and Instituto Cervantes.

Volunteering project