Paola works in Legacoop, a business association in Italy supporting cooperatives at institutional level and through professional services. Paola is responsible for the delivery of technical assistance related to financial services: cooperatives ask Legacoop for support in terms of accessing loans, starting investment processes and identifying financial needs – and Paola replies! Paola has worked for around 10 years in the sector of microfinance, both in NGOs and in the public sector, and has lately moved on to the cooperative sector, where she found a very fertile soil for interesting projects and initiatives.
About Paola’s workshop
Learning how to become a successful entrepreneur is very difficult nowadays. The cooperative business model has been evaluated as more resilient to carry out entrepreneurial activities in a sustainable way. Coopstarter was a Grundtvig-funded project born with the objective of creating tools to effectively train young entrepreneurs in setting up sustainable cooperatives, through the creation of common training standards and curricula applicable by different cooperative organizations. The workshop will present the results of this project, test the tools with the audience to measure how effective they can be, and, above all, gather interest from other European organization to carry on supporting young people with the creation of cooperative businesses