 So here we have another guest in our course and I'd like you to to present yourself first. All right, hello everybody. Good morning. My name is Andréa, Andréa Lombardi, and I'm talking from Italy, from Forlì actually, a small city in the center of the country, center north of the country, near Bologna. And I'm representing UNICEF, actually I'm the CEO of UNICEF, which is a cooperative providing services for learning mobility. So basically, in a few words, our job is to support schools and training centers in order to allow the staff and trainees to send students abroad and have an internship experience in companies all over Europe. Right, this is what we do in a few words, and well, I'm very happy to be here with you and to talk about an issue which is kind of crucial, I guess, for most organizations taking part into the Erasmus Plus program. Okay, thanks a lot for joining the course. And here we would like now to explore one aspect of strategic partnership projects. So we have strategic and partnership, so then I'd like to ask you, talking from your experience of initiating strategic partnership projects and planning the approach of these kind of projects, how to ensure that a project is really strategic, that it has strategic thinking, it has strategic approach, and results also really bringing added value to the field of youth. Right. Well, first of all, I believe that in order to make a partnership strategic, you need to have a strategy yourself as an organization. So just to give a very concrete and grounded example about it, like the vision of our cooperative or organization in the long term is through our services, is to empower as many schools as possible in order to allow any student in Europe access into a vocational education career to have the possibility to go abroad. Exactly like it happens for universities, you know, that everywhere you go now in university, you have the Erasmus program. Unfortunately, it's not the same thing in schools. Well, not yet at least. So whenever you have such a long term goal and any organization, I believe any structured organization must have some goals, some development goal to achieve by its own mission and vision. You must have a strategy, which is not going to be what I'm going to do next week, next month, but where I want to be in five years time. Right. So all along this pathway of developing your own strategy, there are of course your daily activities and then some research and development activities that you have to carry out in order to improve your organization, to reach your strategic goals and so on. And in my opinion, strategic partnership really in an organization should tackle these points. So you should really be thinking about what shall I develop aside of my daily activity because I wouldn't have the time and the possibility and ordinary resources in my daily activity to do that, which can complement any way what I'm doing in my daily activity. So this is I think the key question that you should ask yourself whenever you start designing a strategic partnership. Okay. Thanks. Thanks for that. What would be Andrea also interesting to know? You have initiated several projects. What would you recommend for people who are now thinking, okay, they have some experience, maybe they cooperated with some partners in the past, and they have some ideas to make something bigger, something bigger than just training, something bigger than just mobility. What would you recommend for people to start thinking about if they say, maybe strategic partnership is something of my interest? Yeah. Well, two main points always, of course, from my experience. The first one is how do I make coping the kind of activity that I want to develop through this project with my daily activity? Because of course, they will not necessarily be the same people working on that. Or if they are, I mean, if you have someone which is regularly employed and doing a daily job in your organization, how do you manage to make sustainable and fruitful for this person and for the organization, the implementation of this project? Which is a very big thing, you know, because most of the time we just apply for projects and we, well, we shouldn't, but it happened that you say, well, I'll think about that when I see the results. But that's not at all a good approach, or at least it's an approach that all of us had at least once in life. But once you start experiencing that then you are into a two years project activities, which finally doesn't give you a real added value, and you're wondering, oh my God, why am I doing this? You know, then you start realizing that the kind of grants that you receive for it can quickly turn into a cost rather than into a revenue. If you didn't plan properly the aspect of how do you match it with your activity and how this added value is provided to your activity, not to mention the motivation of the person. If the person involved in the implementation of the partnership doesn't feel that it's bringing something valuable for the rest of the organization, very quickly the colleagues will start avoiding, you know, the contamination or simply the cooperation, because they will see it as a loss of time. So this is a key point. Another one, not less important, is the partners. Partners must not, in my opinion, be simply trusted, because all of us, I believe, we can rely on trusted partners, but they must share the same interests and commitment for the objective of your partnership, of your project. If they just get on board because they like you, because, you know, among partners you do it, you support each other, but at the end of the day they will not really care about the final output. It's very hard. You're gonna get the output you want, or simply, maybe you will have the output, but its quality will not be as relevant as you need. And finally, you realize that close the project, everything is finished and there is nothing stay beyond. So this I would say the two most important things, how you link the activity and the work of the person with the work done on the life of your organization and then the partners that you choose for it and their commitment. Yeah, thanks a lot. I think these are very important things and we kind of cover those both words, right? The strategic part, so aligning project objectives of our own work and then also looking at the partnership side as well. So the partners would see meaning to be involved, would understand their responsibilities and contribution and would really form a strategic way of cooperating together in a way that is meaningful for each partner. I'd like to add an aspect also you made me wonder. You know, when we, a few years ago, we started changing our approach to this kind of projects. Well, first of all, we started doing less of them and more meaningful and we actually structured within our organization a unit of R&D of research and development inspired by what's actually happens in big companies, in industries and so on. Which I believe, in spite of their activity, that they are very much looking to the few forwarding looking. They really have this capacity to anticipate the change thanks to these units of R&D. Of course, in order to create such a unit, you need like important revenues and profit making which we do not ever have in the not-for-profit sector, in the third sector. But nonetheless, there is the possibility indeed through the Erasmus program to structure and get financed these kind of activities. But the all planning that you must do within your organization in order to make this function is a relevant investment to do at first. But I can ensure, I mean, I could stay hours talking about the project we've done and the results, tangible results they brought for the organization and the strategy when they were well planned. So the first investment, and just to give you an idea, whenever we apply for a strategic partnership, we start working on that four or five months before to the concept who could be part of it. I mean, there is a very huge consistent work which has been done before. But taking these as a huge opportunity to structure inside our organization R&D units, I believe that it's something that I'd like more organization to think about because it would be not possible otherwise. Okay, thanks a lot, Andrea, for these thoughts. So I will stop the recording now. I think we covered a couple of aspects and the interview doesn't need to be also super long. So I think it was very straight straight to the point, you know, and and was it you think described.