Online communities are hugely powerful in supporting young people to identify, address and act on their issues. However the effectiveness of any online support community lies in the engagement of the young people who use it. This project aims to recruit 280 young volunteers aged 16-25 to enhance the quality and scope of peer to peer interactions delivered through online support communities in the UK and Denmark. The project will see members of these communities trained to enhance the quality of support available to the 500,000 young people who access these communities annually while gaining valuable personal skills leading to employability. We will develop a light touch, accessible volunteering opportunity designed to promote safe, high quality interactions between young people and the advocacy of the service through their personal networks. The opportunity will be supported by an innovative digital badging scheme developed with HR professionals that recognises the training and achievement of the young people taking part, displays this within the communities and provides a direct link to self-development and potential employment across the EU. Running over two years, the impact of the programme along with learnings and case studies will be collected annually. This work will build towards the publication and dissemination of a report that captures best practice and sets out a transferrable model for delivery for use in other organisations engaged to community management and therapeutic peer to peer activities with young people.
The Mix (UK) partnered with the Centre for Digital Youth Care (Denmark) in order to address the need to help young people to secure employment, a challenge that has become more prevalent. By developing online learning courses designed to improve specific workplace skills this project aimed to improve the employability of young people in the UK and Denmark. These online learning courses resulted in the participant receiving a digital badge which could then be displayed or mentioned in a CV or interview setting. As both organisations are experts in providing digital support to young people it was an obvious partnership. Co-creation sessions were held in both countries with a range of young people and business representatives in order to scope out the project and gain insights on the needs and challenges facing both groups when it comes to finding employment and hiring young people. These sessions informed the decision to create a Problem-Solving badge in each country, as well as an online course to assist a young person in translating their hobbies, interests and volunteering onto a CV. Both The Mix and the Centre for Digital Youth Care were involved in designing, building and developing a volunteer platform to host the online courses and the courses themselves. Once the courses were complete we worked hard to encourage young people to sign-up and complete the course. This involved engaging with external organisations and giving workshops to young people and sector-relevant groups. We also updated our network on the progress of the project by writing blogs which were widely disseminated. As a result, we successfully engaged 342 young people in the courses and 136 young people completed the courses. Of those who completed the Problem-Solving course, 89% in the UK and 86% in Denmark reported they felt they had improved their confidence solving problems. At the end of the project we reviewed the entire project and completed a dissemination report which included our best practice findings that were presented at events in the UK and Denmark. From our findings, we identified four key components that are required for a digital badge to be effective: • Effective design of the product • Developing a badge with value • Developing confidence in online learning • Establishing badge sponsorship As a result of this project we have made great gains in understanding what is necessary for young people to secure employment and we have successfully contributed to the resources available to young people who are looking to do this. Following on from this project we will work to understand how we can increase engagement in digital badging and provide further support to young people with their employability.