The Youth-led Societal Innovation for Resilience, (ySI4R) project uses youth worker education to facilitate youth participation in one of the greatest challenges of our time, climate change. The project wishes to turn the frustration of youth regarding indecisive leadership on climate change to empowerment for constructive change locally leading to active participation of young people in society. The missing piece is an accessible set of youth worker methods and tools to involve youth in community initiatives, and thus enable the active citizenship of young people. The ySI4R Project brings together a diverse range of organisations from Slovenia, Sweden, Spain, Germany, Macedonia, Italy and the UK (including community training centres; national and international networks of sustainable communities with consultative status to the UN and the EU, and youth NGOs which work with marginalised youth such as the Roma communities in Slovenia and Macedonia) to develop and embed an Online Training Course in youth-led community transition in a two-year period, from February 2015 to January 2017. The 7-member partnership will collaborate to design, develop and embed an open online training course of methods and tools filled with best practice examples of youth-led community transition actions tailored to the needs of youth workers. The project will integrate two 5-day workshops, 2 week-long teaching mobilities and 6 long-term youth worker mobilities to gather youth worker experiences from around Europe and combine them into a flexible and creative training experience that inspires and validates learning received. The expected impact of the multi-lingual course is that 1000 youth workers will complete the training in the first year after launch and thus be better equipped to involve participation of youth in the transformation of their communities towards resilience.
The underlying aim of the ySI4R project was to develop a practical instrument to turn the frustration of youth about indecisive leadership on climate change and other ecological and social challenges to the empowerment and enthusiasm for constructive change with active participation of young people in the society. Innovative and experiential youth worker education was seen as a leverage point for such change thus the project aimed to develop a training course of methods and tools integrating the best practice examples of youth-led transition actions. Throughout the two-year project the team of organisations working with youth education from seven European countries developed a large set of experiential activities serving that aim and collected into a course for youth workers, in a form of an open and joyful online toolbox based on gamified activities, storytelling and interactive workshops. The online toolbox, named Bridgedale360, equips youth workers with a diverse variety of engaging activities and storyfied knowledge which is flexible and can be combined into practical and experiential courses empowering youth for sustainable livelihood, resilient local solutions, leadership and active citizenship. The course serves in a way that it can be adapted to the context of a particular youth work. Bridgedale360 is available at www.bridgedale360.org and the information can be found at www.bridgedale360.info. The project aimed that 1 year after launching the platform, it will have 1000 users. Currently, 4 months after the official launch, Bridgedale360 has 800 registered users and dissemination activities are still in process. The ySI4R project brought together a diverse range of organisations from Sweden, Spain, Germany, Slovenia, Macedonia, Italy and the UK represented by community training centres, youth NGOs which work with marginalised youth, and national and international networks of sustainable communities with consultative status to the UN and the EU. In order to gather the diverse youth workers experiences from around Europe and combine them into a creative course, the project team, besides intense collaborative online work, led two international 5-day workshops, 2 week-long teaching mobilities, 6 long-term youth worker mobilities and three 4-days project meetings. The final product, the course, with its core translated to seven European languages, is a great open resource for youth workers around the continent to light up in young people the holistic comprehension of the sustainability and to engage youth in active and responsible citizenship.