With the project Engaging Empowered European Youths we intend to support a large number of young people in 18 countries who have expressed the wish to build a community in which they are artistically and creatively connected through role-playing games. In the last years we have used role-playing games as a highly successful approach in youth work. The beauty of this approach is that it can be used for many different learning goals, such as developing social skills, communication skills, basic skills, teamwork skills, work-related skills and intercultural skills. The project helps youths stay socially/ artistically connected even during pandemics. Unlike other projects we don’t just plan to create a tool for the target group, we intend to create a sustainable community with the target group. Our target group, consisting primarily of younger generations of youths below the age of 20, has been heavily involved from the beginning, even in the project conception phase and in the current application phase. We have reached out to a group of roughly 120 youths in 18 European countries and have managed to involve them in regular online discussion rounds. Through these discussions we have shared ideas and created a plan to develop a huge community of young people which is connected through role-playing games. EEEY is planned with the following structure: Content-wise we plan to build the community on two pillars. We want to make it easily accessible to beginners and as a first pillar plan to provide exciting content for the role-playing sessions that we encourage them to run in small groups. So we will create a starter set which gives youth groups all the tools they need to play. We will also provide more adventure modules at regular intervals (every 3 months), essentially pre-written storylines with challenges that the player groups have to overcome in their game. As the second pillar we want to encourage creativity and support the players in writing their own stories and creating their own challenges. We want to do this through an online portal in which we connect people in a shared world. In other words, players will be able to access a shared map which they can fill with events and places they created in their local game. This means that all their creative output will be shared with hundreds or even thousands of other players in an international community. Apart from providing content for beginner groups (pillar 1) and connecting advanced players in a shared world (pillar 2) we also plan to focus on community building. From our conception discussions we have identified the need for centralized actions that bring people together across borders and localized actions that keep sub-groups connected. As centralized actions we are planning online events (conventions) for which we use channels like Twitch in order to engage a large number of youths in international events which encourage the community feeling and the sense of belonging. We want to support this with an online hub through which youths can join the community, get regular information, connect with others on an international level and find groups in their local area through a group finding tool. As local actions we want to empower youth leaders who take on the role of community ambassadors. The idea is that youths become the point of contact in their school and be the go-to person for anyone who has questions or ideas locally. We plan to support these youth leaders to hold their own local meetings and create their events in order to strengthen sub-groups that can meet in person. All planning and development will be driven by our target group. The idea to establish a youth role-playing community has become a grassroots movement of youths in many different countries and we see ourselves in the position to give the youths what they want. After all, our youths probably know best what engages them and what is best suited for helping them develop. For this reason we are involving our target group right from the start. We have even involved them when planning the project, and many of them have encouraged us to run the project. Find a collection of their comments in the videos here: www.dragon-legion.com/community Our group has had previous experiences with the Dragon Legion network empowering older youths, getting them to embrace an international community, become friends across borders, stay in touch with their new friends, develop their openness and tolerance, become interested in people from other cultures and mostly grow into more active citizens. We have seen amazing success stories and youths who embrace the European idea of cooperation. We believe it is a good time now to focus on younger people in order to expand the benefits of international cooperation and a shared European identity. Our previous successes can be made even more effective if we start with young people, especially when it comes to growing the minds and attitude
Our vision was to create and grow a large sustainable community of European youths that can have a tremendous impact on society at large. We built this community to strengthen the European idea in a long lasting way so that youths can remain connected to each other across borders and continue to be active in their local communities as well as on an international basis in general long after the funding has ended, because the community they created is their own, based on doing enjoyable activities with other young people from all over Europe who share their same passion. We managed to create a growing community on Discord which currently boasts 660 members and keeps growing every month (see annex). Engaging socially and in a fun way can reach a lot more youths than through training courses and workshops since these games are the kinds of activities youths voluntarily choose to do anyway as recreation. We also wanted to create the materials that would let us take our role-playing activities with youths to the next level and provide better learning opportunities.
Youth engagement in society is hugely important, however, we also see that for many youths it is very difficult to get involved. Most don’t know where to start or don’t even have any motivation to get involved. We believe that this can only be achieved if people experience the advantages of cooperation and becoming a community across national borders. Unlike other approaches that mostly focus on training classes and workshops we had the plan to create a lasting experience for thousands of young people. We set out to create a community that unites youths in their hobby of role-playing games connecting them tightly and making them care about each other. Role-playing games offer wonderful stealth learning methods and our intention was to provide game materials that can challenge youths to train important skills that they need to become active European citizens. Even before applying for this project we discussed ideas with our target group. Find a collection of their videos here: www.dragon-legion.com/community/ Throughout the project we kept young people involved in all stages and paid special attention to their needs and wishes. We believe that this was the biggest key to the project’s success.