The COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent lockdowns drastically changed young people's lives, namely their access to education opportunities. This period also showed the importance of technological and digital skills for youth workers that want to reach and work with the youngsters. They need to be creative and implement engaging lessons/activities which are able to catch young people's attention and keep their interest and motivation high. The artistic methodologies in education stimulate creativity and bring mindfulness, as well as bringing positive and optimistic vibes. All these elements can increase the motivation of the youngsters to accept the challenges related to the pandemic's stressful context. Thus, a combination of non-formal education, visual arts and digitalisation can be the answer to these youth workers' needs. Nevertheless, educators also need to be trained on how to adapt those artistic tools to the new digital frame in order to develop quality education. For 24 months, 3 partner organisations from Romania, Spain and Greece, will cooperate to empower 200 youth workers affected by the pandemic consequences, to develop a quality non-formal learning process using artistic tools in a digital frame. The Butterfly Effect (BE) project aims to empower these 200 youth workers by giving them new digital competences (knowledge on how to use programmes such as Zoom, Skype and Google Meet) and by training them on how to adapt artistic methodologies to the new digital frame. These 200 educators will also gain socio-cultural and civic competences by designing an online platform for youth workers and 6 training courses. The 200 beneficiaries, mainly youth workers with fewer opportunities, will be divided into 2 groups. The first one will include a total of 27 experts, 9 in the field of visual arts, 9 in that of graphic arts and 9 I.T. and digital communication specialists. A.C.T.O.R. will select the visual artists, Hellenic Youth Participation the graphic artists and Mille Cunti the digital and I.T. experts. These 27 participants will join three seminars at the beginning of the project, and they will collaborate on the design and the creation of an online platform. The platform, created by youth workers for youth workers, aims to give to the educators new tools, inputs and suggestions on how to use arts and creativity in a new digital era. The second group will include other 180 youth workers, 60 from each organisation, who will be trained on how to use the new platform and will give feedback on its practicality, contents, accessibility and the overall design. The activity through which the result will be obtained will be: 3 SEMINARS with 27 youthworkers, digital and visual art experts, which will be in charge, over a period of 6 months, of designing and building the online platforms, as well as planning the following training courses. 6 TRAINING COURSES planned for 180 educators in total (60 from each organisation). During these events, the youth workers will be trained on how to access and use the platform. 3 TRANSNATIONAL MEETINGS, organised for and by the coordination team. The main objectives of this meeting are to evaluate the work done so far, to eventually modify some part of the overall project's strategy on track and to plan the subsequent months and activities. 1 MULTIPLIER EVENT planned to promote the work done by BE with stakeholders, educators, youth workers and the local communities. SEVERAL DISSEMINATION ACTIVITIES organised to promote the work made by the youth workers and the platform for the entire duration of the project. With regards to the methodology, the project will use mainly techniques of non-formal education in the field of visual and graphic arts. A large part of BE can potentially be carried out online, and almost all the preparatory, dissemination activities and the preparation of the platform will be conducted online. As stated before, the project aims to empower 200 youth workers by giving them new digital and artistic skills that they can use during their work. Additionally, BE aims to create an online platform available in 4 languages (English, Romanian, Greek and Spanish) to spread artistic and non-formal education tools in different communities (the primary targets will be the involved organisations' communities). In total, the project aims to improve the skills and style of 400 educators and to give to 4500 young professionals with fewer opportunities and kids formal and non-formal education.
Due to some reductions in the budget compared to the request in the funding request form, the number of beneficiaries was adjusted as shown below: BE OBJECTIVES were: O1- to empower 94 youth workers and educators supporting them to gain better quality professional competencies using visual artistic methodologies in their online youth work and training and educative actions O2 - to develop to 162 youth workers and educators intercultural socio-cultural and civic competencies by cooperating to the design on line resources (one training course design and an educational platform). O3 - to empower 94 youth workers and educators to develop quality educational products and process using digital competencies based on visual artistic methodologies.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent lockdowns drastically changed young people's lives, namely their access to education opportunities. This period also showed the importance of technological and digital skills for youth workers that want to reach and work with the youngsters. They they had to be creative and implement engaging lessons/activities which are able to catch young people's attention and keep their interest and motivation high. The artistic methodologies in education stimulate creativity and bring mindfulness, as well as bringing positive and optimistic vibes. All these elements have had the power increase the motivation of the youngsters to accept the challenges related to the pandemic's stressful context. Thus, a combination of non-formal education, visual arts and digitalization was considered in Butterfly Effect project to be the ideal answer to these youth workers' needs. Nevertheless, educators also they had to be trained on how to adapt those artistic tools to the new digital frame in order to develop quality education.