What’s your name and job title? 

Popi Aresti, EU Project Manager

Tell us a few words about your background: 

Graduated from the University of Strasbourg,FR, with a BSc in Languages and Intercultural studies and is currently attending a Master’s Degree in Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) in Cyprus university of Technology (CUT). Have worked in multiple positions over the years one being an english language teacher and project management with projects focusing on education. 

What organisation do you work for?

Centre for Social Innovation (CSI), Cyprus

What does your organisation do? 

Centre for Social Innovation (CSI) is a Research and Development organization which focuses on fostering social innovation that can bring about a positive change to local, national, regional and global contexts. CSI belief is that the four pillars of Social Interaction, Education, Development and Economic Rationalization coupled with fundamentally sound and sustainable solutions as well as disruption to streamlined solutions to systemic social problems can lead to creative solutions that impact significant change to the social fabric of every society. CSI is working closely to address social, economic and cultural challenges with governments, local administrative agencies, non-for-profit agencies, commercial entities, and educational institutions. CSI identifies and addresses systemic challenges through evidence-based research, state-of-the-art investigation of global, national, regional and local solutions, developing solutions by taking into consideration the local ecosystem, and cultural dynamics, meet the stakeholders' needs and implementing those solutions as CSI keeps constant vigilance to ensure continual feedback loop and adjustments. The areas of expertise are in the fields of social integration, intercultural education, Vocational Education and Training, labour, education planning and e-learning, project management, project evaluation services, product validation, and training.

What is your role in the Code4SP project? What are you currently working on?

Popi on behalf of CSI, will primarily concentrate on providing top-notch social assistance for the implementation of the Code4SP project and in particular, training activities that directly affect disadvantaged people.

Why is being part of the Code4SP project important to you? 

Coding is challenging, but it is a key skill in many industries today. To me, it is crucial that Code4SP recognize the significance of creating training programs and providing assistance to socioeconomically vulnerable populations in order to increase the number of ICT experts in Mediterranean nations, including Cyprus. Given that vulnerable populations have few possibilities to learn ICT skills, including coding, and grow in the quickly evolving digital world, this must be taken into account on a very serious level.

How do you like to spend your free time?

Watching theatre performances, reading books, studying languages etc.