Aim
The overall aim of the partnership is to improve training routines, learning environments and collaboration potential in regards to leadership development within the European Civil Society.

The partnership incorporates 6 partners from 6 countries, all of which are organisations active in the field of capacity building in the NGO sector. Lead partner is SOCIUS Organisationsberatung gGmbH, a Berlin based nonprofit training and consulting agency.

Over the course of the next 2 years, about 50 adult-education-trainers from 6 partner-organisations throughout Europe. Indirect beneficiaries of the partnership are the NGOs serviced by the partners and their staff who will be involved as learners on a local level. Each of the partners has a local network of at least 10 to 15 NGOs they service through trainings of all different settings resulting in a number of up to 120 NGOs and their staff as indirect beneficiaries. Thus around 500 to 600 people (paid and volunteer staff of NGOs) will indirectly be involved in the project.

Concrete outcomes of the partnership will be
Create collection of enhanced strategies and training tools for leadership development as a cornerstone of capacity building within the NGO sector as well as a network infrastructure for further collaboration in the field of adult education in an European Civil Society context that will be confirmed by a common letter of commitment.

It will be also part of the project work to receive locally political and
public support for the set-up of the named network. Dissemination of the project's results that will be facilitated via essays in relevant online and offline periodicals, local seminars with NGOs and partners and documentation of the work-meetings and the conferences held during the project time. Furthermore, the partnership will be actively communicating the results of the co-operation to the research community.

General Context
The organisations involved in the proposed partnership are active in the field of adult education and training within the European Civil Society Sector. While some partners work with affinity to a more academic setting (e.g. ERCC, Lithuania), others are rooted in a practical field context – integrating educational content in organisation development processes or on-the-job trainings (e.g. Develor, Turkey). Furthermore, some partners focus exclusively on training in the Civil Society Sector (e.g. Plataforma Andaluza de Voluntariado, Spain) while others have open boundaries to serve also the business and governmental sector (e.g. KaosPilot, Denmark). These differences are in part a mirror image of the varying NGO support infrastructures and dominant vocational training strategies within the respective countries.