JobAct Europe establishes a new form of education and social work – we call it SOCIAL ART. Social Art combines classical fields of social work with creative techniques developed in theatre and acting. Social Art is a further development of the JobAct theatre approach developed by the lead partner over the last 11 years. In Social Arts, social work becomes an art and art becomes social work. We believe that the art of the future will be social and that we need to develop an artistic approach to cope with the current social issues. In Social Arts the materials of the artists are not canvas, marble or stages, but social issues. The social artist will apply an artistic approach and methodology to solve these issues. Creativity, imagination and inspiration are the key skills of the social artist to overcome the obstacles. Based on their combined experiences the partners will collaboratively develop this general approach towards the social inclusion of four different target groups in need. The target groups will be selected by all partners at the beginning of the project based on the relevance of the issue, the expertise of the project consortium to tackle the issue and a European dimension of the solution. The project consortium will form work groups for each of the four social issues, each led by one partner with a special track record on this issue (e.g. entrepreneurship training for migrants). The work groups will develop Social Art solutions for the social inclusion of the target groups concerned. Thus, in the end, we want to develop new project formats to support socially excluded groups in need. During the project development process for the new formats, we’ll put great emphasizes on the scalability and ‘trainability’ of the new approaches. We will develop one-week train-the-trainer courses, to train pedagogues and theatre practitioners the new methodology. During this project four teaching and training activities will be conducted, one for each social issue. We plan to train 20 trainers per training, thus summing up to 80 trainers total acquiring the new methodology. Together with the trained trainers, all project partners will be able to implement the new formats in their own product portfolio and run Social Arts projects themselves. The project consortium seeks to implement the new formats in the daily operations of the partners and thus scale the new approaches of social work to all four countries. Based on the trainings the project partners will be enabled to launch pilot projects. Based on the combination of social work and theatre training, participants of the pilot projects will be empowered, provided with the skills and competencies they lack, and supported to find their way (back) into the labor market. The whole process will be continuously monitored and documented in order to disseminate the project results. We intend to develop three different intellectual outputs summarizing the new approach of Social Arts and offering a tool set for the four target groups concerned, dealing with qualifications of the social artist and frame conditions to run these new formats and giving a best practice collection about the four target group adaptions. Potential funding strategies are included, because their development marks a crucial step for the successful scaling of the new approach on a European level. To disseminate the intellectual outputs, we will hold four multiplier events, one per country, to share the results and the new methodology with interested third parties and practitioners. We expect to have up to 200 guests in all four events towards the end of this project. The project consortium consists of 8 partners from the 4 countries FR, DE, HU and IT. The partner selection is diverse by size and scope of the organizations, ranging from freelancers to an international organization. It is also diverse by the field of expertise combining partners form theatre and acting, social work, business consulting and innovation management, fundraising and project management, entrepreneurship training and academia. Each partner adds a special expertise towards the goal to develop sustainable and realistic, new approaches for the social inclusion of disadvantaged groups. Main results of the project are the tool set that can be used by trainers to carry out social art projects with different target groups, by multipliers to learn about the principle and its fields of application and a European Network that includes organizations and stakeholders who share the vision of making art an education principle. With the help of the project, individual job chances for disadvantaged groups are improved verifiably and institutions who work with these groups are given the opportunity to expand their curricula by an effective approach. By providing a tool set to enable adaption of the approach to individual purposes, the education principle can be used in various fields of action.
One of the central current European challenges is the education and integration of people in society and the labour market who are disadvantaged due to unequal biographical opportunities. This requires innovative approaches and forms of cooperation between different actors. One socially innovative approach that aims to contribute to this is that of social art. In this approach, hierarchies are dissolved and art becomes an integrative process of cooperation, which in many ways creates space for experiencing success, mutual understanding and personal development and contributes to the empowerment of disadvantaged groups. On this basis, forms of combining theatre work and social work have already become established in Germany, that show far superior results than the traditional methods of integrating disadvantaged people into the labour market and society. The project JobAct Europe followed the aim to collaboratively develop this general approach towards the social inclusion of different target groups in need based on the combined experiences of partners from 4 different countries (IT, HU, FR, GE). Target groups differed between the countries, because of the different approaches of the participating institutions and the most pressing national problems. So in the end we focused on: youth unemployment (IT), young people without perspective (NEETs) (GE, IT), former drug addicts (IT), migrant single parents (FR), School drop outs (FR), orphans (HU). The overall aim of the project was to realize pilot theatre projects in every country using social art for social integration. The practical implementation in the pilot projects consisted of two phases: a 3-6-month theatre training course followed by a 2-4-month internship. In the first phase, the participants receive acting training 3 days a week, during which a play that will later be ready for the stage is rehearsed. They design sets, props and costumes one day a week and receive individual application coaching one day a week, during which an individualised career plan is drawn up for each participant after carrying out potential analyses to identify individual strengths and problems. At the end of the training phase, the play is presented to a broad public. Here, the aim is to achieve a twofold effect, (1) the supplementation of the participants' self-perception, which has already changed in the course of the training phase, by the sense of achievement of the performances and (2) the change in the perception of others in the social environment of the participants, the job centre supervisors and, if necessary, company representatives. After the presentation of the play, the participants directly begin the work internship, with the high and self-esteem that comes with the successful premiere. To make this possible, we took the following actions: We met very regularly and set up transnational work groups, in which the concepts were developed and experiences exchanged. We helped each other with selecting participants, getting funding, finding suitable plays or rooms, answering questions about the right settings or frame conditions and helped solving any problems that occurred in the process. In every meeting, we had sessions of practical exercises that could be used in the daily work with the participants. We had a row of 4 train-the trainer events, where the approaches and strategies from every country were taught to the trainers from the other institutions. On top, we used the transnational meetings to visit the ongoing pilot projects in the other countries to learn from their experience and use it to realize more pilot projects. All in all, by this course of action, we managed to realize 13 pilot theatre projects with 224 participants in total during the EU-project, two of which just started. In the finished projects, most of the participants could successfully be empowered to find employment, self-employment or take up a qualification or education. The second big aim was to disseminate the approach beyond the partnership. As this can best be done by telling success stories, the realization of the pilot projects was already the first step. We had Multiplier events in each country, 8 in total, where the pilot projects could be presented, theatre methods were shown in practice and stakeholders could be convinced of the approach. The created Tool Set enables a broad dissemination and adaption of the approach. Lastly, the aim was to enable continuous work with the method. For this, getting pilot projects funded on a national level, was an important part of the work in the project. The pilot projects show that this could be achieved in all the partner countries. So one of the best results of the project is that the work with Social Art methods in projects with target groups in need will be continued in all the partner organisations.