The project has one main activity, a mobility of youth workers that is structured in two macro sections (Seminar and PBA) that will blend different methodologies and activities in an innovative way. The flow of the activity will support the professional development of 30 youth workers from 10 different youth organisations across Europe and beyond (Morocco, Azerbaijan, Kosovo). A detailed preparation and follow-up phase will ensure the overall success of the project. The project is designed for youth workers that will possibly also have experience of managing international projects and a commitment to improving the participation of young people to European programmes.
The Project "Digital Awareness Methods for Newcomers - How I learnt to promote EU opportunities to youth with digital tools" is an innovative mobility of youth workers. We want to carry out this project because, as youth workers we have often found ourselves struggling to effectively reach young people and to make them understand what are the opportunities available to them. The ideation of this project originates from a discussion between youth workers experienced in European projects that evidenced three directions for an intervention: 1) The new generations - born in the digital era - have a very different way of consuming information. A great deal of the promotional material available to explain the European opportunities for young people doesn’t take this into consideration. And often times the youth just ignore them. A general lack of youth-friendly promotional material about EU has a very negative impact on their participation. This mismatch is even more acute when taking into consideration both youth workers and youth organisations. 2) In fact, youth workers don’t feel confident of their digital skills - Constantly overburden by daily activities, youth workers struggle to keep up with tech and innovation trends, the fast pace of change creates a distance between newer and older generation, our interviews reported. 3) In addition, youth organisations are afraid to try “new things” - Cash stripped and with limited resources organisations report a general tendency towards “what has always worked” in terms of methodologies and approaches used, citing the need to evidence impact with funders as the reason they haven’t tried some “innovative youth work methodology”. Young people in Europe spend an increasing amount of their time consuming digital media and technology, and digital literacy and 21st century skills play a crucial role as part of modern-day citizenship. Thus, all young people of today will need technological skills and an agile mindset towards technology in their future work and everyday life, and youth work should be able to encourage this. Aims and objectives Thus this project aims at increasing the participation of young people to the European Programmes, and especially reaching out to marginalised youths, by a) developing the digital competencies of 30 youth workers/staff of youth organisations; b) innovating methodologies, practices and organisational culture of the participating youth organisations. To this end we designed a mobility of youth workers that will blend a seminar with a PBA, using different methodologies and activities in an innovative way to achieve the following objectives: 1) To Raise Awareness of EU opportunities, policies and tools for youths 2) To Increase the digital competence of youth workers with a specific focus on Digital Creativity, Content Creation and Communication and Collaboration 3) To Create youth-friendly promotional material about EU, in particular about: EU Youth Strategy and the Youth Goals; Opportunities within Erasmus Plus and Solidarity Corps. 4) To improve European and transnational cooperation between youth organisations, build new partnerships and develop new innovative projects together