Representatives of youth organizations, SMEs, Cluj-Napoca Municipality and “Babeș-Bolyai” University joined the CoOp multiplier event organized in Romania by Fundatia Danis, at the end of June 2019. The stakeholders were challenged to come up with new ideas for involving more SMEs in solving community problems. Their ideas were included in the final public policy brief proposed by Fundatia Danis to local authorities, SMEs, youth organizations, business associations and umbrella organizations for NGOs.

Main objectives of the event were to introduce to the stakeholders the CoOp project, aims, activities, partners, funders and main results obtained, and to identify ways of enhancing the cooperation between SMEs and youth organizations from Romania.

The participants got familiar with the educational resources developed within the project, such as the the CoOp CSR & Fundraising Training Toolkit for youth organizations, the CoOp Ready Tools for Fundraising for youth organizations. Also, they learned about the Vlog developed within the project and CoOp Best Practices Guides. The stakeholders received all the information about the content of these resources, and discussed on how these resources could be further used by youth organizations and SMEs to improve or to start their collaboration.

In the last part of the event, Fundatia Danis shared with the stakeholders the draft of the policy brief it developed, and challenged the participants to come up with new ideas that could be done at the community level to get more cooperation projects between SMEs and youth organizations. Also, they talked about the municipality and the university role in this process. Some of the ideas included community challenges for SMEs, organized by the municipality, meetings between university alumni (the majority already working in the business sector) and NGOs, online matching platform between SMEs and youth organizations, fairs and pitching events, etc. All the ideas were included in the policy brief proposed by Fundatia Danis to local authorities, SMEs and youth organizations.

Finally, the stakeholders generated ideas on how CoOp project could be continued at national and international level, using the great results and network already developed during the project implementation.