"The ageing of Europe’s population is a challenge for the 21st Century. Ageing well is a frequently used concept, describing the objectives of future elderly care. Enabling elderly people to live longer and independently in their own homes is one goal for society as a whole. Empowerment of older persons is needed. It is a process of strengthening, whereby individuals (but also organizations and communities) get a grip on their own situation. There are already tested and efficient screening instruments (geriatric risk profile) to detect elderly people who are at risk to developing dependency. The Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment - CGA measures the risk on five items and is a clinical management strategy which gives a framework for the delivery of interventions in these items. The items, measured by the CGA, are situated into the social, functionality, cognition, depression and nutrition field. Extensive research proves that CGA in hospitals increases independence and reduces early mortality. Another research shows that those who underwent CGA on a hospital or care home ward had a 30% higher chance of being well and in their own home at six months' follow-up period. What is described above is known, but is rarely applied in practice; there is a gap between research and practice, and the bridge between is education.The aim of Lucky you project was to develop a European Study Program (as a result ""Ageing at Home - the Best Choice"") with practical methods and materials for social and health care providers as well as students to improve their knowledge for supporting aging population´s empowerment. The project was based on the CGA’s items. They gave a solid theoretical and scientific base for the transfer of innovation and development work. Five Thematic Meetings around the CGA items were organized by the partners: HBO IC DIEN VZW (BE), IES Manuel Gutierrez Aragon (ES), Hyria (FI), SZSVZS (CZ) and Riga University (LV). The coordinator, Jyväskylä Educational Consortium (FI) organized the kick-off meeting and Akureyri Hospital (IS) was responsible for the meeting concerning testing the plans and giving a multi-professional point of view.The items were selected to each country according to their prior knowledge, research, practice or specified needs. Some were familiar with their field of CGA, some acquired the ideas and methods during this project; peer learning was one of the key issues and proved to be a very significant element to all.Prior to each meeting, collection of material was done by interviewing the elderly in each country (by students), gathering information on most recent studies and mainly used practices (run by the experts) as well as collecting teaching methods and priorities (by teachers). Extra attention was paid to preventing possible failures in elderly persons’ lives at home. The data was studied, discussed and analyzed during the meetings according to each thematic field. The webpage www.luckyyou.eu includes a material bank with all the study material, interview videos of the elderly in each partner country, documentary film and trailer “Lucky you – getting older in Europe”. It can be freely and publicly used for the next six years. The study program is translated into all partner languages. The aim is also to increase material in the website by all users. The study program resulted much wider and more profound than was planned and it can be used by educators in several study levels, and even by voluntary workers. Pedagogically, it is variable in many ways and situations and it can be used either as a complete program or only in thematic study units. The results are disseminated in all the partner countries in the educational institutes with Social and Health Care studies or in elderly care organizations as well as NGO’s. The partners will inform their students, colleagues, superiors, working life partners and shareholders, accordingly. A European Union level Release Event on the new Study Program on Empowering the Elderly (Multiplier Event) was held in Belgium in June 2018. In the long run, increasing the knowledge, skills and competence on the education of elderly care, the healthy and happy years of the European elderly will be increased."

An important number of people who ask for assistance in social and mental health sectors are defined as groups with fewer opportunities and often their children present educational difficulties.The fact that people with fewer opportunities are in higher risk of social exclusion makes our efforts to bring social interventions closer to the community (and so less individualistic) a crucial matter nowadays. This project seeks to contribute to enhance and spread family and community resources in institutions working in social, educational and mental health sectors in order to improve their work, to allow them to reach more users in less time and to give to these users and their families a more efficient and high quality intervention. Our partnership focuses on building up a strong transnational network where community and family resources in social, educational and mental health are discussed and shared through a digital platform. The target group of this project are professionals in need of more family and community tools to work with the ultimate target group: socially disadvantaged people and/or people suffering from mental health problems. In this project, each institution is both willing to share their work as well as learning from other institutions, in order to achieve the following objectives: - To improve achievement in work with community and family resources within partner institutions. - To spread new competences in community and family resources and to give to its participants a theoretical and practical knowledge. - To enhance skills in community and family resources for both professionals and students’ practice. - To offer high quality learning opportunities to workers of partner institutions. In this project, each partner institution will welcome 6 professionals from any of the partner institutions along the 2 years of project. The participant will be chosen in their own institutions based on their interest and possibility to apply innovative ways of working in their field and their abilities to convey new information to the rest of his/her working team. They will choose their destination based on their interest in the different approaches offered by partners institutions and its feasibility to apply it in their own institutions. Participants will learn and share different ways of approaching community and family work. During these 5 days, different teaching activities will be carried out, such as cooperative work, acquisition of formal knowledge, visiting innovative structures from the local network, interfamily group sessions, etc. These professionals will introduce what they have learned during this week to their own teams back home and will introduce what they have learnt and how this interacts with their previous way of working in the digital platform. Along the duration of the project, the following products will be delivered: - A state of art of previous experiences in community and family resources in social, educational and mental health sectors will be done at the beginning of the project in order to contextualize it in the current scenario. - A digital platform will be created in order to share, spread and discuss interventions in community and family resources, strengthening a professional network around these issues. - A manual or book guiding the implementation and use of community and family resources in social, educational and mental health sectors. Strong guidelines are devised in order to consolidate this professional network in the future. - Short-term training events will help professionals to acquire a higher knowledge in techniques that deal with efficiency and high quality work in community and family resources. These experiences will be materialized in short essays after each training event. - An assessment report of the project that will delimit the strengths and the weaknesses with a synthesis of the expertise and a description of the specific skills. - An evaluation of the programme and approach to results is performed. This project aims to ground to earth the directions of EU, such as the one stated in the Lisbon strategy regarding the achievement of social cohesion (Rodrigues, 2009). As professionals working in social, educational and mental health sectors, if there is a need to support this cohesion among marginalized users and families, we have to start by ourselves, strengthening cooperation among professionals and among European institutions and by enhancing the development of innovative methods.