The strategic partnership "Write your creative story" aims to develop new digital tools for youth workers for increasing creativity of young people through creative text writing and storytelling. In order to do this, the partners will enhance the skills of the youth workers for working with creative methods online. The partners will develop a combination of digital text writing and storytelling tools. The final result of the project will be Digital Toolbox and a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) containing these newly-developed tools, freely accessible for everybody who's working with young people, in and outside EU. The main objective of the project is developing new and innovative tools: Digital Toolbox and a MOOC based on digital creative text writing and digital inspirational storytelling, that can be used for boosting creativity of young people, inclusion and social connection among them. We chose these two fields deliberately, because in our experience, they showed to be effective, successful and popular. Combining these two will helps young people connect, find similarities, resocialise and become more active and creative. To boost the creativity of youngsters, an extra step is necessary- that is why we want to combine creative text writing and storytelling. Activities: - there will be Case studies in every participant country, 4 Transnational meetings, 1 Learning Teaching Training, 1 Multiplier Event, designing the Digital Toolkit and creating a MOOC. Target groups: - primary: youth workers, educators, artists, cultural workers etc. (32 directly involved) - secondary: youth facing decrease of creativity/motivation (170 directly involved) The final results from this project will be: - Case study and developing methodology on digital storytelling (IO1) - Case study and developing methodology on digital creative text writing (IO2), - Digital toolkit (IO3) - MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) (IO4) The Digital Toolkit will contain tools and techniques for youth workers based on methods used in digital storytelling and digital creative text writing. These tools and techniques can be used for facilitating different stages of online workshops: warm-up, team building, main creative part, closure, debriefing and evaluation. The MOOC will contain a course targeted to the youth workers with practical step-by-step guidelines on how to facilitate online workshops based on digital storytelling and digital creative text writing. This course will also contain practical tips and tricks for facilitation, ways of adapting the techniques etc. These results will be free to use, easily accessible for every youth worker interested. The tools will be easily understandable, user-friendly and intuitive, so they can be useful for every youth worker, regardless of their experience. Impact: 1. Youth workers - learn new tools and activities that can be applied online in their home countries for supporting creative young people; - have practical experience of using storytelling and creative text writing in their work for stimulating creativity; - share and get to know situations and experiences of other youth workers from all over Europe; - participants will improve their communication skills and style; - become more relaxed and confident to work with intercultural groups and facilitate online events; - get to know more about the Erasmus+ programme and project management; - create bonds with each other for further cooperation; - have a set of exercises to facilitate and foster intercultural competences development through non-formal learning. - gain practical experience from assessing oneself. 2.Young people - they will be involved in new projects set up by these organisations. The final goal of this is that the youth will be able to be more creative, active and can create mutual understanding and can contribute to the building of stronger, respectful, and resilient communities. In the field of youth work, there are plenty of methods and tools on how to engage a participant in creative mood. Traditionally, they are designed to work in context of physical presence. However, nowadays, due to all Covid-19 restrictions, there is a need of developing new ones that will function online, and finding new ways how to transform them in a digital way. We want to design new digital methodologies and tools to increase creativity of young people, and to help the youth workers/educators in facilitating new workshops online. We strive to develop methodologies and tools that are easy to use by the youth workers/educators in various contexts. The methodologies and tools will be based on a combination of two creative directions: creative text writing and storytelling. These methods can be used even after the end of the pandemics- for distance learning, workshops and sessions on distance etc.
The main objectives of the strategic partnership "Write your creative story" were: - to enhance the digital skills among youth workers in online facilitation; - to develop new digital tools and methodology for youth workers for increasing the creativity of young people through creative text writing and storytelling; - to provide learning possibilities for those tools and methods for the youth workers. Other important objectives of the project were: - improvement of skills & competencies of youth workers; - strengthening the collaboration and cooperation between the partner organisations. We chose the two fields of creative storytelling and creative text writing deliberately, because, in our experience, they showed to be effective, successful and popular methods for bringing young people together, finding common ground and most importantly, giving them a chance to create something together. This combination is a strong tool in times when visual/digital communication is very important, especially among youth. We used "their language" to invite them to meet the others and trigger critical thinking. We created a digital Toolkit and MOOC that can be used by every organisation, youth worker and even individual for free.
We wanted to apply the strategic partnership "Write your creative story” in order to develop new digital tools for youth workers for increasing the creativity of young people through creative text writing and storytelling. Because of the pandemic, the partners needed to enhance the skills of their youth workers for working with creative methods online. From the Needs analysis we did, we found out that in every country involved, there was a trend of decrease or stagnation in creativity and engagement of young people. We as partners in this project, all active in the youth work, fully endorsed this conclusion. The needs for developing and executing this project were: - lack of concrete digital skills for facilitating creative workshops online; - lack of concrete tools and methods for the aforementioned facilitation; - development of an online methodology that can be used in situations that require distance facilitation; - boosting the stagnating creativity among young people and providing them with new ways for socialisation; - providing a systematised Toolbox with tools and methods and also, a platform for learning these new tools and methods (MOOC - Massive Open Online Course).