The DiARC project combines the efforts of 4 partners and an extended network of 8 associate partners, representing two main regions of Europe – Western (UK, Belgium), and South Eastern (Bulgaria and Slovenia). The purpose of our collaboration is to support young people to become more resilient in addressing the negative impact of COVID-19 and similar future crises. This will be achieved by supporting professional artists, who are negatively impacted on by the pandemic, to improve their entrepreneurial competencies and prospects of alternative employment as online trainers of young people. With this project we aim i) to integrate our know-how in providing training for young people in the fields of creativity, entrepreneurship, coaching and ‘soft skills’ into a comprehensive online training course (IO1) for nurturing resilience and ii) to encourage them to develop their artistic skills and competencies in combination with their entrepreneurial skills, in order to better serve themselves and their communities. We will train professional artists (IO2) to become online trainers in this course. We will enrich the online training process through a set of digital creativity cards (IO3). Our proposal directly links with the COVID-19 Call main youth horizontal priority and the ongoing youth specific priority, with the emphasis on the quality of youth work. Our innovation proposed is related to digitalising our youth creativity training opportunities by emphasising two dimensions: *Content - integrating creativity and entrepreneurial learning, which will allow for young people and professional artists to use their creative skills and entrepreneurial competencies to improve their employability prospects and increase their capacity to address individual and community challenges. *Delivery - engaging professional artists who are suffering from the financial recession, to develop their youth work skills and competences in the delivery of online creativity training. Our project's acronym is DiARC symbolises our attempt to bridge partners from different EU countries around all highlighted topics and search for a solution matching our resources and expertise in order to increase the resilience of young people and the arts and cultural communities to the negative consequences from COVID-19. The concrete objectives that we will pursue to implement our aim are to: - Design and pilot an online training course in creativity for young people - Design and pilot an online training course for professional artists in the delivery of creativity training and development for young people - Design and pilot an interactive tool (digital creativity course) to ensure engagement of learners - Engage 100 young people and 12 professional artists in piloting all outputs - Engage 200 young people and 24 professional artists in the exploitation of all outputs - Engage 400 youth workers and other relevant stakeholders with the project concept and future use of outputs. We expect the following impact to emerge from achieving the main tangible and intangible results: *For young people: By engaging young people in peer learning activities through the online creativity course, will have an immediate effect on enhancing creativity skills and the motivation to utilise them to address individual and community challenges. We will provide them with an online creativity training that also emphasises 'hard' skills, related to areas such as entrepreneurship and project management. We therefore expect to observe an increased application of initiative and entrepreneurship, improved levels of skills for new business creation in the arts and cultural sectors and beyond and enhanced digital skills. These immediate effects will contribute to the resilience on individual and community levels, which can also be expressed as preparedness to face unpredictability and uncertainty in a constructive way. *On professional artists: Their competences in creative youth work will improve. They will receive opportunities for the direct application of their new competences in pilot training activities. Their opportunities for employment and entrepreneurial competencies will improve. The long-term effect will be that they will widen their sources of income in times when the art and cultural sectors are suffering and still be able to keep working on their professional practice. Through the project they will have opportunity to connect with professional artists from other countries and engage in other initiatives. In the long-term, by training resilient young people we will contribute to the next generation of young people, who instead of being afraid of uncertainty, will embrace it as a source of innovation. We will contribute to training young people to be sensitive to community challenges and to see transnational collaboration as a driver for quality sustainable solutions.
We wanted to achieve the following objectives: For young people: • improved creativity and motivation to address individual and community challenges. • improved entrepreneurship and project management skills. • improved skills for new business and enterprise in the art and cultural sectors and beyond. • improved digital skills. For professional artists: • Improved competences as youth trainers in applying their creativity skills. • Improved employment opportunities • Improved financial income in times of economic stress. • Improved opportunities to connect with professional artists from other countries and engage in other initiatives. We wanted to: • Engage 100 young people and 12 professional artists in piloting all outputs. • Engage 200 young people and 24 professional artists in exploitation of all outputs. • Engage 400 youth workers and other relevant stakeholders with the project idea and future use of outputs.
We wanted to apply for this project because we wanted to support young people to become more resilient in creatively addressing the negative impact of COVID-19 and similar crisis in the future. We also wanted to support professional artists who were being negatively influenced by the pandemic by improving their opportunities to widen their employment opportunities, specifically by developing their skills and expertise as online creativity trainers of young people. We wanted to integrate our know-how in providing training for young people in the field of creativity, entrepreneurship, coaching and soft skills into a comprehensive online training course which would nurture their resilience and encourage them to be develop their artistic talents in combination with their entrepreneurial skills, to better themselves and their communities. We wanted to enrich the online training process through the production of a set of digital creativity cards as a means of improving the quality of their youth-focused work. The DiARC project combined the efforts of four partners and an extended network of eight associated partners, representing two main regions of Europe – Western (UK, Belgium), and South Eastern (Bulgaria and Slovenia).