There are strong signs that local, regional, national and international youth engagement is shaping many aspects of life through creative digital means, Greta Thumberg, the internationally renowned youth activist, utilises the creative digital sphere for her activism ,and to reach out to other young people and the powerful alike; but there are many other young people doing so, and there are also yet many others who wish to get involved but need help, support and skills. Youth workers with creative digital skills are vital to encouraging, skilling and motivating young people in this field. The context of DigiSMARTS is the need for young people to, not only have good digital skills, but to be able to apply these to engage with citizenship, democracy and social change, to become influencers and activists, skilled-up and ready to shape the future. DigiSMARTS, addresses the priority of supporting youth workers in the broad European youth workforce, through providing online open access, free, educational resources, taking them through the steps required to run a successful online activism project, working with youth in co-producing change in an area such as environmental concerns, employment and skills, crime levels or social inclusion/equality issues. The objectives of the DigiSMARTS project are to: -Provide an excellent quality, free to access, open educational platform, delivering knowledge & skills on how to use and implement innovative creative digital arts projects & activities for youth workers across Europe. -Create a free to access set of open educational resources, which provide a firm foundation of creative digital skills, whilst also provide built in reflective opportunities for youth workers to audit their own skills levels in creative digital practices & plan how to inject these into their own practice & activities with youth, -Create excellent quality educational resources on this area, with youth workers and groups of youth themselves, ensuring that the project outputs and resources meet a broad range of stakeholder and beneficiary needs, -Disseminate the education resources broadly, ensuring that a range of youth and youth-related workers know about and access these, thus having extensive impact on youth work across Europe, upskilling youth work and positively changing the experience of young people. -Influence local, regional, national and EU policy on creative digital activism, building youth employability skills and digital inclusion to support innovative digital arts and literacy, supporting greater youth civic engagement and enabling youth to be activists around vital issues in societies. The DigiSMARTS consortium is a mixed-sector team of six HEIs and NGOs, who all either work in the field of youth services, who train youth workers or research youth work issues: Birmingham City University (UK); the Western Balkans Institute (Serbia); CARDET (Cyprus); Necmettin Erbakan Üniversitesi (Turkey); TURUN AMMATTIKORKEAKOULU OY (Finland) & Polygonal (Italy). They will work together to create Open Access Educational Resources for youth worker across Europe, using work package model, where one organisation leads in creating the resource, supported by the others. The participants and main target group in the project, will be youth workers and also youth policy makers at various levels. Young people themselves will also be involved in DigiSMARTS on advisory and qualify committees. The activities of DigiSMARTS will create open educational resources, which, it is aimed will downloaded at least 100,000 times across the project lifetime, influencing the skills and work of 25,000 youth workers across Europe, which will mean impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of young people. The results will include a report from dialogue on needs and digital skills for activism with youth workers and youth, an educational platform, four open access educational resources and one open access resource illustrating examples of youth work digital activism projects. There will also be 12 free webinar training opportunities, for youth workers and policy makers. The impact envisaged is that the project influences youth workers across Europe, with 12,000 new digital activism projects starting as a result of the project by 2023. The longer term benefits will be felt by youth, as the beneficiaries of the youth worker skills created by DigiSMARTS, it is expected that youth will gain digital activism skills for activism, increasing their general digital employability, leading to greater opportunities in the workforce and, more generally, supporting creative digital industries due to a greater skilled employment pool of young people.
The consortium team aimed in the bid and achieved an open, free, user-friendly resource for youth workers so they could access learning to understand digital issues, build their skills and capacities, and that would encourage their greater engagement with the digital world as a tool for youth activism. We wanted to achieve: -an excellent quality, free to access, open educational platform, delivering knowledge & skills on how to use and implement innovative creative digital arts projects & activities for youth workers across Europe. -a free to access set of excellent quality, open educational educational resources, delivered on the platform, to provide a firm foundation of creative digital skills, reflective learning opportunities to enable them to audit their skills and use these in youth practice. -Engage with youth workers & representatives of youth organisations, meeting a broad range of target group, stakeholder & beneficiary needs for information on digital activism, -Disseminate the education resources broadly, to upskill youth work & positively change the experience of young people. -Influence different levels of policymakers on creative digital activism, ultimately to support youth civic engagement & activism.
The project was born from the recognition of the changing work/skills landscape of youth work/workers across Europe. The European Commission (2019) states that there is a diverse "broad European youth workforce", holding different levels of qualifications - from no formal youth work qualifications to masters or doctoral level - with some paid staff but many working as volunteers. These youth workers operate in different contexts, from part time work in small community or faith organisations to full time in public sector or private organisations. Remote youth work was increasing during Covid-19 lockdowns and youth work was challenged to increase its digital engagement with youth. The project developed in this context of intense change and aimed to address the emerging broad youth workforce needs around digital skills/competencies in relation to digital activism projects. Activism has become a key interest for many young people and they have taken to the digital as a means of inclusive participation. There was an urgent requirement for free, user-friendly, accessible learning opportunities to help youth workers undertake digital activism projects and we have met this need in the DigiSMARTs project free outputs and resources.