Youth Work - Music and Cultural Entrepreneurship

Project summary

The aim of this project is to identify, design and test a best practice approach to engage and retain young people aged 16 to 25 in youth services using music as a medium. The project will look at achieving this by analysing existing methods and procedures that are used by each of the project partners’ youth music projects and programmes. These youth music projects and programmes will include lead partner Youth Work Ireland's Irish Youth Music Awards, Samfés, National confederation of youth clubs in Iceland (Iceland) Stuck Together project , the Five nations partners UK Youth, Youth Action Northern Ireland, Youth CYMRU and Youth Scotland's Big Music Project and Lithuanian Children & Youth Center practice in youth work looking at education through non formal methods. Each partner will take on one area to specialise in based on their own knowledge. These will include:Employment - UK – (Four nations) - EmployabilityEnterprise - Iceland - Enterprise – business sideEducation – IrelandYouth Work Practice – Lithuania focussing on non – formal methods leading to competences oriented to their employability or making decisions on their professional studies.The project will produce an online toolkit/site for how to support young people’s growth at the end of the project by focussing on desktop research, information sharing from existing information within each organisation and transnational meetings.This online toolkit/site will use an interactive content management system to create a space for rentention and disemention of material and policy after the project has completed. It will have active users who will be champion certain updates on the site similar to an online publication or blog as well as having an internal backend where users can link together on further projects and discuss current policy and initiatives. The site will work off an ACL which stands for Access Control List, it will allow the project partners to manage the users of the site, and different groups. This will create extensive control on who can see what and who can edit or manage what. This online toolkit/site will be able to embed and host existing information available and will act as a very crucial hub and online community for youth workers, volunteers and policy makers within Europe and further afield. This project will tie into the “EU Youth Strategy (2010 - 2018) policy cooperation framework of the EU” by adhering to its main objectivesTo provide more and equal opportunities for young people in education and in the labour marketTo encourage young people to be active citizens and participate in societyAs youth clubs and projects provide a safe space for young people to develop new skills we believe this is the perfect space to develop a programme which will support the growth of these young people into cultural entrepreneurs.In a report by EY commissioned by Gesac entitled “Creating growth - Measuring cultural and creative markets in the EU” published in December 2014 we can see the importance of supporting and developing young people's skills and expertise within the creative and music industries that exist. As stated in the report these industries contribute to revenues of €535.9b with the creative and cultural industries (CCIs) contribute to 4.2% of Europe’s GDP. The sector is its third-largest employer, after construction and food and beverage service activities, such as bars and restaurants.The project will have a significant impact on a European level by creating a pan European youth focussed programme which will further contribute to empowerment of young people to express themselves as well as further upskilling them to explore third level education thus leading them to further contribute to the growth of the music and cultural industries that exist across Europe. The project will use a have some clearly defined intellectual outputs which will be produced under a creative commons license (Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International) this will mean that the material produced from the project can be shared (copied and redistributed in any medium or format) and can be adapted (Including remixing, transformation and can be built upon for any purpose even commercially). As part of this the licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms. A part of the license there must be appropriate attribution — users must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. This may be done in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.